Serial ATA - Now!

[Pariah]

"Please show me a USB/Firewire/SCSI HD (internal or external) that doesn't have a seperate power connector?"

QPS M2

6GB,10GB,20GB,30GB firewire bus powered hard drives.

 

[Pabster]

Plenty of 80-pin SCA SCSI drives out there. The power connector isn't separate. Does that answer your challenge?

 

[thorin]

"That's a nice molex connector. But then so is this one. Now which is it, combined or separate data/power cabling?"


Hmmmm that's curious ..... I'll see what information I can hunt down.

Thorin

 

[Pariah]

It's a dual cable setup. Here's a link to Maxtor, look half way down:

White paper

"Molex?s Serial ATA connector line features differential pair signaling technology. It supports 1.8?, 2.5? and 3.5? form- factors with both cabled and direct docking systems. The combined signal and power interface, with built- in hot-plug capability, is ideal for blind- mate applications, including notebook media bays and RAID storage units."

You cut out the middle sentence which clarifies what they are talking about:

"In addition to the small 7 pin signal segment, a power segment is defined in the interface allowing use of 12, 5, and 3.3 volts."

In this instance segment should be read as cable. Count the pins on the signal cable in McCarthy's link, there are 7. Then there is an additional cable for power that is defined within the interface. Interface is not synonymous with the word cable.

 

[thorin]

I didn't cut anything out of the quote that was a straight copy/paste from the announcement PDF on serialata.org however I've checked molex's site and product list and I agree they are more clear there in making it sound like 2 seperate cables (how very sad .... well maybe they'll get the cabling right for SATA2 when they add command que'ing to the list of SerialATA coolness). Oh well for the time being I'm still excited about SerialATA vs PATA even just for the fact that there are smaller cables, lower power/heat reqs, multiple drive access and hotplugging.

Thorin