will serial ata drives require new power supply?

[draggoon01]

noticed the power connector is different. will current power supplies be somehow made adaptable?

 

[AndyHui]

The initial drives will be dual power source: powered either by the standard molex, or by the Serial ATA connection. I should think that eventually it will be just the SerialATA power connection, but that will be a long time coming.

 

[smp]

I know Andy is right, but I imagine it woudln't be too hard to make little dongles or something .... if all they're doing is changing the plug, not the actual voltage .. ?

 

[draggoon01]

so will a dongle be possible? if so, why bother with new connector?

 

[ai42]

draggoon01 is right you ARE going to have to Serial ATA power plugs. If you saw the article on Toms HW, it mentions that there is all kinds of crazy voltages, 3.3v 5v and 12v, the power supply already supplies 3.3v to the mobo so it isn't a huge design change but still would have to be done.

You can't really adapt from a 4 pin molex to serial ATA power, but if you had an additional ATX passthrough cable to steal 3.3v power and you had the 4 pin power then you could.

Also if anyone read it you have multiple pins for the same voltage so you can actually make a hard drive hot swapable (they called it something else but its the same idea)!

Also if anyone noticed the test Serial ATA drive was simply a WD120JB drive with a diffrent controller board and my guess is they changed as little as possible from the ATA100 counterpart as possible (to simplify things). But I think a 16MB buffer is required under the Serial ATA spec.

Lastly the Toms article talked a lot about PCI bus limitations inhibiting Serial ATA from using all of the speed. I talked to a Via rep at QuakeCon and the next AMD based chipset (she called it KT400A, but said it could be named something diffrent) will have Serial ATA support in the southbridge so hopefully Via won't be stupid and tie it into PCI bus.

 

[ravedave]

you just need an adaptor.
plug in a floppy cable + std 12v and your good to go.

serial ATA drives do not have std 12v molex connectors on them.

 

[Markfw]

Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know, the 4 pin connectors (for floppy or HD type of drives, also on new Radeon video) that are used for other than the motherboard, only have 5v and 12v and ground. 3.3 volt only goes to the motherboard, so if the drives need that, new PSU's would be required.