- Oct 9, 1999
- 72,636
- 47
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World?s First Board with SerialATA Support from Iwill
- Thread starter NFS4
- Start date
Adul
Elite Member
Adul
Elite Member
pillage2001
Lifer
- Sep 18, 2000
- 14,038
- 1
- 81
Someone posted some pics of the adapters the other day. Try looking for it. Not much of a performance increase though. :Q
So when are the actual drives going to hit the market??? What kind of performance advantage are we going to see with this new type of interface??? mb/sec???
Adul
Elite Member
I dont expect an increase, but any would be nice
I am looking foward to finaly getting rid of these damned ribbon cables
it will increase to ATA150 from current ATA133. but ***REMEMBER*** people, this is not about performance!!!! performance increases always happen, and as far as ide, they don't matter a whole lot. most drives dont do ATA66 a whole lot of justice. this is about smaller cables, no jumpers, etc etc. i would go scsi if i could afford it, but unfortunately i cant. so serial ATA is what i'll eventually use (along with all other ide users), and i think its pretty damn cool. about time we ditch those lame ribbon cables.
After initially thinking SerialATA was pointless, I'm now pretty much a convert, though not a fanatic. The smaller cables is really the only reason I'm interested in it, simply to save the time and hassle of disconnecting/connecting and routing ribbon cables.
Heck, depending on the prices of adapter cards or motherboards with an external SerialATA chipset, and the adapter boards to make an IDE drive work with SATA, I might just convert as soon as possible, and use the parts in any computers I build for other people.
Hopefully OEM's will jump on SerialATA soon now. The standard has been in place and grown for some years now, so I'm not sure why they haven't started using it, other than the fact that chipset makers haven't integrated it yet (and you'd think they could have pushed the chipset makers if they wanted it enough). Imagine how much more marketshare somebody like SiS could have gotten by now if they'd integeated SerialATA first in the market, whereas now it'll just be that everybody will be getting it around the same time so there won't be any advantage.
One thing I haven't understood is why SerialATA was focused on internal devices. As far as I can see, it'd be nearly ideal for external hard drives. No need for an adapter card to be built into an external enclosure using a native SerialATA drive, no need for an external power supply. Firewire can provide the same functions, but you need an adapter card which increases costs, and the throughput is limited. With an external SerialATA drive you'd get exactly the same performance with an external drive as an internal. The only downside is the lack of daisy-chaining, but just sticking two external ports into a system would be more than enough for most people to run a hard drive for backup or a CDRW drive, and anybody that needs way more than that is probably using SCSI anyway.
Oh yeah, and I don't mind it being a P4 motherboard here, as I'm planning to get a P4 soon anyway, but I'd hope to see one based on a SiS chipset with SerialATA as well. I don't want to pay for an Intel chipset board.
Heck, depending on the prices of adapter cards or motherboards with an external SerialATA chipset, and the adapter boards to make an IDE drive work with SATA, I might just convert as soon as possible, and use the parts in any computers I build for other people.
Hopefully OEM's will jump on SerialATA soon now. The standard has been in place and grown for some years now, so I'm not sure why they haven't started using it, other than the fact that chipset makers haven't integrated it yet (and you'd think they could have pushed the chipset makers if they wanted it enough). Imagine how much more marketshare somebody like SiS could have gotten by now if they'd integeated SerialATA first in the market, whereas now it'll just be that everybody will be getting it around the same time so there won't be any advantage.
One thing I haven't understood is why SerialATA was focused on internal devices. As far as I can see, it'd be nearly ideal for external hard drives. No need for an adapter card to be built into an external enclosure using a native SerialATA drive, no need for an external power supply. Firewire can provide the same functions, but you need an adapter card which increases costs, and the throughput is limited. With an external SerialATA drive you'd get exactly the same performance with an external drive as an internal. The only downside is the lack of daisy-chaining, but just sticking two external ports into a system would be more than enough for most people to run a hard drive for backup or a CDRW drive, and anybody that needs way more than that is probably using SCSI anyway.
Oh yeah, and I don't mind it being a P4 motherboard here, as I'm planning to get a P4 soon anyway, but I'd hope to see one based on a SiS chipset with SerialATA as well. I don't want to pay for an Intel chipset board.
I see the benefits of SATA in the simplicity. I am already using a SCSI setup because I hate the shared channel nature of IDE. Master, slave, having to juggle my devices so that I won't have to access 2 devices on a channel at once, it drives me nuts. SATA will be a lot simpler and the lower cost may convince me to give up my SCSI setup.
Well, you have to admit that master/slave is a bit more simple than assigning SCSI device ID's (at least with older devices that don't automatically get one from the adapter). And the only reason SerialATA avoids the issue of multiple devices needing to use the channel at the same time is that it only supports one device per channel. SCSI is a much more elegant solution in that respect, since there's no way a single IDE device will EVER really need even 150MBps throughput other than occasional bursts of data, let alone the 300MBps, 600MBps, et cetera that SerialATA is going for. They would have greatly improved the spec if it allowed multiple devices with multiple access at the same time on the bus, similar to SCSI.
Honestly, SerialATA150 is going to be plenty of speed for a long time to come. There's really not much need to go beyond that until the hard drives truly catch up to it, rather than being able to occasionally fill that bus for a few moments at most. Even an 8MB cache Western Digital SE drive, that's only 1/19th of a second using the cached data, and that assumes you even have 8MB of data cached.
Honestly, SerialATA150 is going to be plenty of speed for a long time to come. There's really not much need to go beyond that until the hard drives truly catch up to it, rather than being able to occasionally fill that bus for a few moments at most. Even an 8MB cache Western Digital SE drive, that's only 1/19th of a second using the cached data, and that assumes you even have 8MB of data cached.
vailr
Diamond Member
- Oct 9, 1999
- 5,365
- 54
- 91
Lord E.: Serial ATA DOES require/have a separate power connector. Someone posted pictures last week (on this forum), showing the 2 connectors, one for data and one for power. So, your idea about an external SATA drive would also require a power connection.
This might be a dumb question, but what connectors on that board are for Serial ATA devices? The board looks like any other conventional board with 4 IDE connectors. Are these also used for Serial ATA? I read somewhere that the Serial ATA uses a very thin cord with very few wires.
Oh yeah, forgot that the power was a separate connector. I was just remembering that power is a part of the SerialATA spec, as opposed to IDE. However perhaps it would be possible to adapt that to some sort of external connector as well, it's only a few extra wires. It would make a slightly heavier cable necessary, but I would expect a heavy cable anyway due to it needing to be protected. You couldn't just route a limp normal SerialATA cable for this purpose.
Booster, there are no SerialATA connectors on the board pictured. The standard P4E is probably the board pictured, the P4ES is the version with SerialATA.
According to the filename, that is the P4ES pictured. Neither the P4E or the P4S appear the same as that board. However it doesn't appear that the image is actually that board, as no connectors are visible, nor does there appear to be an actual Silicon Image chip on it (which can be seen here).
BrunoPuntzJones
Lifer
- Feb 24, 2001
- 14,513
- 4
- 81
Couldn't find the P4E on the IwillUSA site, nor searching Google. Didn't occur to me to look for other Iwill domain names (though often the non-US sites have more recent information for manufacturers). The P4E image I did find was the first version shown at a trade show, considerably different from the current version.
- Oct 9, 1999
- 72,636
- 47
- 91
One thing I'm not understanding is why the spec calls 1.5Gbps equivalent to 150MBps. 1.5Gbps is actually about 187MBps. If they're using a divider of 10 rather than the divider of 8 for a byte, then they're being misleading (and oddly, not in their own favor). If they're factoring in some sort of overhead, well, that's just stupid, because seeing the two rates beside each other makes it look like they're just converting the numbers into a more recognizable form and using bad math, rather than showing the "actual" throughput available. If there is some sort of overhead and they want to show actual throughput, then it should be 1.2Gbps and 150MBps.
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