Why aren't Serial ATA drive out yet??

[mfavin]

Supposedly motherboards will be out by the end of the month that have Serial ATA support, such as several SIS 648 motherboards.

Yet other than a press released from WDC a couple months ago, there seems to be precious little info about availability of the drives!!!

 

[foocoding]

Seagate will have serial ATA drives out in time for the newer motherboards to support them.

 

[SolrFlare24]

The serial ATA drives will be out before too long...also many companies are going to offer a "dongle" that will let you hook up a Parallel ATA drive to serial ATA. The main advantage to that is you will have complete backwards compatability and hey, you can use that cool little thin cable 🙂

But Serial ATA is going to be in place soon, and since with dongles you can get backward compatabilty in either direction, they plan on slowly rolling Serial ATA into the market so that its pretty much standard by say end of next year.

 

[Mday]

cant you wait until the fall?

they are still going through their paces...

They are being manufactured now. And they have to wait until the controllers exist.

i have been waiting for about 4 or 5 years, so a few months wont hurt.

 

[mfavin]

I hope they'll be available by the big price cuts coming September 1st. Ideally I'd like to get a SIS 648 board w/ Serial ATA, Pentium 4 2.5, plus of course the SATA drive.

 

[SolrFlare24]

Yeah the SIS chipset should be good, the other shiner will be Abit's IT7 max2 which is the IT7 max only with 2 RAID slots converted to Serial ATA connectors and 2 USB 2.0 changed to traditional PS/2 ports because of all you whiners who just couldn't be legacy free 😉

 

[Civic2oo1x]

Any word on the size of these drives?

 

[NOX]

YOu can get this: RocketRAID 1520 2-Channel Serial ATA RAID Host Controller- Retail . Though I'm going to get a real Serial ATA drive (RAID0). I see the price has come down a bit (was $150+).

 

[Vegito]

WTF is that crap, it says max 2 channel 2 drives, i thought you can have like 4-6 per channel or higher..
wasn't that the driving force for serial ata ?

anyway, know what would be good for serial ata, 36" + cables !!!

i got a full tower and i can only put scsi on top because scsi cables are looong

 

[aka1nas]

They only support 1 device per channel, which is better because each device gets its own bandwith, and doesn't hog the bus for the rest.

 

[thorin]

WTF is that crap, it says max 2 channel 2 drives, i thought you can have like 4-6 per channel or higher..
wasn't that the driving force for serial ata ?

SerialATA is point-to-point, therefore each device gets it's own channel (thus all drives are treated as masters and no jumpers are needed). It's up to manufacturers to decide which specific controller (chip) to implement and how many channels that controller can handle.

I don't understand why people are so surprised and complain about this. It's like saying "OMG my router only supports one connection per port" whaaa wahaaa whaaa......hmmmmm DUH 😀

On the topic of the RocketRaid 1520 as you can see in this picture it has HighPoint's usual ATA133 RAID controller (HPT372A) and two little Marvell chips however these aren't SerialATA controllers they're SerialATA to Parallel converter chips. So the Highpoint 1520 isn't actually a SerialATA solution it is currently a ParallelATA solution with SerialATA support***. (This would also apply to the motherboards you're talking about). This also explains why those adapters from HighPoint are so large ... when someone releases a real SATA product the adapters will be small dongles or gender-bender type devices.

? Check here for more info:
RocketRaid 1520 Review
(***See page 5 of the review for information on the PATA-SATA-PATA conversion latency etc...)

? And check this thread for info from last week:
SerialATA Info

anyway, know what would be good for serial ata, 36" + cables !!!

SerialATA supports 1 meter cables (perhaps you should go do some reading 😛 Or maybe you meant "...is good for..." not "...would be good for...")

Thorin

 

[Heretik]

According to newest issue of PCWorld, Seagate will have their SATA drives available by fall, with Maxtor and Western Digital to follow by the end of the year.

From this page at Seagate it appears they will initially offer 80GB and 120GB drives in SATA.