Originally posted by: drag
Sata is not a joke. It's just plain better technology, so what if even the newest HD won't fill up current IDE ribbon cables? Much of the complexety of modern HD's is just to deal with the crap that goes on in those ribbons. They have no sheilding to speak of and they are fragile, and bulky. Not only that you can get away from the horrid master/slave BS that plagues us with all this legacy hardware...
The only ways in which SATA is "better" are:
1) reduced cost from lower pin count <- these first 2 are the ONLY ones which manufacturers could give a rat's ass about
2) increased hype/marketing factor to dump new mobos/controllers onto the market
3) command queueing (its actually in the protocol spec that drives can reorder the operations they are told to do if the firmware determines it will improve overall speed. AFAIK no SATA drive does this yet but a few IBM PATA drives support their own proprietary equivalent).
4) Varied pin lengths designed for hot-swapping
It's important to introduce new technology now, because in the near future we are going to see drastic changes in PC technology, they need to get as far from that 20+ old parallel cabling technology inorder to introduce new invovations.
No. It isn't. Most of the negative attributes of PATA were fixed with the ATA/33 spec. The inherent scalability limits before they would need to change it are 10 times higher transfer rates than SATA BTW
due to the parallel nature.
Could you imagine what will happen now if they were introduce new super fast ide HD that actually came close to filling up the 100Mb per second limit? Massive data corruption, that's what. Who would want these new super fast HD's? who would be willing to pay the exorbiant fees of the newest technology even faced with the uncertainty of any new tech breakthoughs? Well the PC hobbiest that's who. Who would get blamed if you had a overclocked motherboard that worked fine until you plugged in a new HD? now you got massive data corruption, windows XP gets wiped out in a week... would they actually do reasearch and learn to blame the neon lights and 19-24 inch ide cables wrapped in black tape (or there 12 dollar metal braded "sheilded" cable? ) Are they bother going to run tests compare copied files to find the source of bit rot is the hyper active IDE controllers on the overclocked bus?
Nope they would conclude: The HD is obviously running on the ragged edge of it's materials..(a reflection of overclocking various motherbords) flaky technology thats what it is already sent out pre-overclocked/stressed from the factory, obviously can't be trusted, probably gonna wear out in a year, released it to soon. They should of know better than to inflict buggy hardware on US! So you boys in marketing better stick with those SCSI's drives, you don't want what happened to my windows XP happen to your finacial spreadsheets....
That's what WILL happen with SATA. In order to achieve the same transfer rate as PATA it must be clocked 10 times higher. This puts the current SATA/150 only slightly lower frequency than your cellphone & microwave, and overclocking it will put it squarely into the same band. The cost-centric nature of the whole thing encourages the cables to be poorly or completely unshielded.
They way I see it now the current standard of IDE contolers/cabling and harddrives technology has fullfilled it's potential. The move from 40 to 80 wires was just a stop gap. Those extra 40 wires are grounded... spaced evenly between active wires, just to keep the super fast electronic signals from unsheilded wires from interfeiring with the others. (in other words reduce crosstalk) It's got the same 40 wires to carry info as its older brethern which in turn in a stopgap solution for a 20 active/20 grounded wire solution from the wayyyyy back when wire technology was REALY crappy. It's fragile, error prone, relatively slow and has a maxamum of 4 devices, where only 2 of the devices will be able to reach their potential IN A IDEAL SITUATION.
IDE was never 20 pins or 20 signals ever. Most of the base 40 pins have
always been used. 20 pins with an 8 bit data bus and a few pins for control would get you at best an addressing space of 128K on the drive (assuming standard 512K block sizes). I'd put good money on SATA proving more "error prone". The only
real point you've made here is that only 2 of the 4 devices on 2 IDE buses can reach full potential -- the master/slave system IS a back hack, but can be ignored.... just put one drive per IDE chain, everything is master, no significant disadvantage vs. SATA.
To say SATA is a joke is like saying that parrallel printer cable are all that are needed... Why would anyone want USB, there is now reason why someone would fill up the bandwith in those wire with just todays printers?
USB1.1 was a sick joke, and the old Parallel port
IS/b] FASTER AND MORE RELIABLE!!. BTW there were plenty of parallel port devices that saturated it over a decade before USB.
Sure USB2.0 and firewire are faster than a parallel port but what do you expect from a technology that comes 20 years after the one its being compared to was last revised?
