Technical Specifications of Serial ATA

[enddogg]

I know that serial ATA is better than traditional parallel ata. I also understand that the BIOS and OS will not see a difference between the two types of interfaces. However I'm curious as to whether the cost / performance increases are worth it. I know they are in the process of rolling out serial ATA and I'd really like to know the technical specifications that make serial ATA such an advantage and if the computer experts here think it is really worth the switchover.

 

[earthman]

go to adaptec.com and read the whitepaper

 

[Shalmanese]

Advantages:

Longer, thinner cables
Full Duplex instead of Half Duplex (I think)
Minimal cost increase
It needed to be done anyway so why not do it now.

 

[XMan]

Originally posted by: Shalmanese
Advantages:

Longer, thinner cables
Full Duplex instead of Half Duplex (I think)
Minimal cost increase
It needed to be done anyway so why not do it now.

Needed to be done anyway .. . how so? The drives themselves seem to be the bottleneck, not the transfer interface. While serial connections will provide for higher bandwidth down the road, right now the drive hardware is holding things up. All the benchmarks I've seen indicate that serial ATA, as of right now, provides no cost increase. Is it cool because of the skinny cables? Definitely. I just don't see the urgency that you seem to.

 

[Shalmanese]

Well, it provides a theoretical bandwidth increase for no cost. If we were to do it further down the line, there would be more motherboards, more HD's and more computers and the transition would be far more difficult. We might as well do it now since it doesnt really matter either way (except for people who want cooler computers or longer cables), we might as well switch now rather than when we become bottlenecked by ATA.

Im not saying that its urgent but that it has no disadvantages and a slight advantage so we might as well do it.