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What's the benefit of Serial ATA over conventional UATA?
- Thread starter hk10Mbps
- Start date
GTaudiophile
Lifer
Smaller cables to mess with inside the case, better airflow.
Faster transfer rates.
Not worth investing in at the moment, though. The tech is still quite new, SATA controllers currently run off the PCI bus, and no major HD manufacturers offer SATA drives yet.
Faster transfer rates.
Not worth investing in at the moment, though. The tech is still quite new, SATA controllers currently run off the PCI bus, and no major HD manufacturers offer SATA drives yet.
GTaudiophile
Lifer
Better than 133MB/s transfer rates (ATA133). I think SATA drives will debut at ATA150 equivalent.
Parallel techonogy had many inherant problems. One of them is many wires because parallel data transfer moves data across many wires simulataniously. Next you have timing issues, as you speed things up, there are no guarantees that the data from every wire will get to the same place as the same time. Timing can become a real pain. You also have issues with long cables. The longer the cable, the less chance all the data is gonna get to the same place and remain intact. There fore maximum throughput is limited to about where they are now.
Serial technology moves data one bit at a time across one wire. Data is also received one at a time across another wire. That eliminates many of the timing issues associated with long cables and fast speeds. You can therefore make the cables longer and scale up to higher speeds. Having one wire send and another receives also means the ability to communicate in afull duplex mode.
Bad 1:30AM explaination
Windogg
What the...? Serial-ATA and ATA-133 are NOT faster than ATA-100. This is due to the limits imposed by the current PCI. Serial ATA arrived too early. Should have waited for 3GIO, the next PCI. Best to go with Western Digitial Special Edition Hard drives at this point. Theoretically Serial ATA provides better airflow but it has been shown that they DO NOT reduce temperature in the case.
Some of this repeats what has already been said.
Pros:
Thinner cables for better airflow (I haven't seen proof of this).
Longer cables.
Faster (Starts at 150MB/s)
Better noise immunity.
No need to set master/slave.
Cheaper to implement long term.
Cons:
Only one device per connector.
Pros:
Thinner cables for better airflow (I haven't seen proof of this).
Longer cables.
Faster (Starts at 150MB/s)
Better noise immunity.
No need to set master/slave.
Cheaper to implement long term.
Cons:
Only one device per connector.
How is that a CON? That's a big chuck of the point of the interface. It's a point-to-point interface ie: each connector/device has it's own pipe to the controller. It's up to manufacturers of chipsets/add-in cards/motherboards to decide which controller to implement and how many connections that controller supports.
SATA uses 10B encoding therefore 1.5Gbps (giga bits per second) = 150MBps (mega bytes per second). SATA Generation 2 will ship @ 300MBps and Gen 3 will ship @ 600MBps
To answer the original question:
PROS:
? No Master Slave (each device is treated as master)
? Lower Electrical Requirements
? True Hot Swapping/Plugging
? Better transfer and throughput rates (no master/slave config then no channel sharing then no waiting to access the channel)
? SATA interface is backwards compatible with current/past PATA drives through the use of a Dongle or Gender Bender type device
? Smaller cables (everyone's favorite)
? Completely OS/Driver transparent (the OS or Driver just sees each drive as a master so no updates/patches are required)
Thorin
Advantages:
Lower pin count = cheaper
Hot swappable
Thiner cables blocking less airflow
Support for command queuing is standard, rather than having special implementations by a few vendors that aren't usually supported.
Support for external devices
No channel sharing
Disadvantages:
Initial clock rate to get 150Mbps is 1.5GHz thru a cheap cable (not across the few inches of trace lines on a video card). For comparison, 160MB/s Ultra-wide SCSI is clocked at 80MHz. I'll believe the claims of scalability when I actually SEE them, but honestly, I think at any given level of technology, parallel ATA could go several times FASTER than serial (it's 10x faster if you clocked it the same). Unfortunately further advances there are being abandoned in favor of lowering cost.
I will not be at all surprised to see benchmarks of SATA and ATA100 versions of what are otherwise the same drives consistently showing the ATA100 version to be faster due to a lower error/retransmit rate.
Lower pin count = cheaper
Hot swappable
Thiner cables blocking less airflow
Support for command queuing is standard, rather than having special implementations by a few vendors that aren't usually supported.
Support for external devices
No channel sharing
Disadvantages:
Initial clock rate to get 150Mbps is 1.5GHz thru a cheap cable (not across the few inches of trace lines on a video card). For comparison, 160MB/s Ultra-wide SCSI is clocked at 80MHz. I'll believe the claims of scalability when I actually SEE them, but honestly, I think at any given level of technology, parallel ATA could go several times FASTER than serial (it's 10x faster if you clocked it the same). Unfortunately further advances there are being abandoned in favor of lowering cost.
I will not be at all surprised to see benchmarks of SATA and ATA100 versions of what are otherwise the same drives consistently showing the ATA100 version to be faster due to a lower error/retransmit rate.
If every motherboard/card manufacturer puts on more connectors than anyone would want, it will not be an issue. My A7V8X, for example, only comes with 2 serial ATA connectors. Most of the serial ATA RAID controllers at the moment only have 2 or 4 connectors. My SCSI cards have 2 connectors and I can connect up to 30 devices, so I think they could have done better on that one.
You are welcome to disagree with me, but I find it a disadvantage in some ways. If you notice, I also noted it as a pro (no needing to set master/slave), so it depends on what one thinks is more important. I don't find setting SCSI IDs that difficult, so I would have much prefered that approach.
Yes (but currently sold out here).
Soyousa.com is also supposed to carry it, but their Web page always seems broken to me (mySQL errors).
They are kind of pricey at this point ($40).
Unfortunately this thread is about PATA vs SATA not SCSI vs PATA/SATA. If you want to compare SCSI to something perhaps we should talk about Serial Attached SCSI then you'll have apples and apples and oranges and oranges without having to mix.
Here's some highlights fromt he Serial Attached SCSI FAQ (but you really should read the whole thing):
Thorin
🙁 I was hoping you wouldn't think I was trying to compare (Pro/Con) serial ATA to SCSI. I was merely trying to illustrate a different approach they could have taken. I do not like the one device per connector approach they chose. They could have chosen a better one than SCSI and I would have been quite happy (Maybe something similar to the plug and play SCSI IDs that have been proposed). The USB approach would have worked for me (allowing hubs to expand the number of connectors). I even like the approach of parallel ATA better than serial ATA, at least it allows two devices.
As for serial SCSI, there are a number of technologies competing for that title. Fibre channel and IEEE 1394 have both gained market share in their own niches. I really don't know what technology will win the title, only time will tell. Just out of curiousity, have you seen any products actually using SAS yet?
Ok I see what you're getting at, however at the same time SATA is a consumer level interface not a workstation or enterprise level interface (like SCSI or FC) so there is rarely any need for more then 4 devices (especially with the capacity difference between these consumer level devices and enterprise level devices). Also recall that alot of people attempt to only put one PATA device on each connection (now that we have alot of people with 2 normal and 2 raid or 2 normal and a PCI controller) to avoid the draw backs of PATA channel sharing (even though you could have 2 devices on each connection).
You really should take a few minutes and read the FAQ linked earlier then you'd know that Fibre Channel and IEEE1394 are aimed at very different markets then SAS. It also talks about product rollout dates and the cost differential with ParallelSCSI.
Thorin
Thanks for the link to the site earlier, but I did read it and looked around the site for more information. The FAQ is more of a marketing document than a real FAQ, IMO. I couldn't find any data sheets, specifications, or even white papers anywhere on the site. That leads me to believe that the technology still has a ways to go. I have heard of a few companies starting to offer SAS technical classes (probably similar style to an IPv6 class I was sent to). I'm sorry, but I just don't take that FAQ as anything other than marketing speak.
The FAQ says they might have the standard defined by the middle of next year. Once it is defined as a standard (or products start using it) I will give it a better look, before then it is vaporware.
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