Serial ATA

[Avid6eek]

Has anyone heard anything new about when serial ATA is going to become a reality? It's been quite a while since I've seen any new info about it.

[Colin]

Apparently Serial ATA will be out Q2-Q3 this year and I think Abit or maybe it was Shuttle, anyway one of those companies will have a serial ATA based motherboard out very soon! That should really give SCSI a run for its money and will give us a nice performance boost!

[Avid6eek]

Certain IDE Hard Drives already give SCSI a run for their money. Examples include the Western Digital 120GB 8MB Cache, and the IBM Deskstar 120GB. For this reason I feel serial ATA will be able to easily top SCSI. Since Hard Drives are the biggest bottleneck, any improvement in their technology could drastically improve PC performance. It's kind of ironic...after not seeing anything new on Serial ATA, the day after I post a messege it's announced Serial ATA will be demo'ed at Computex.

[revvy]

Hmm... I believe it is Iwill that was the first to announce that they will be releasing a mobo very soon supporting Serial ATA...

[Colin]

Serial ATA might even challange USB and Firewire for external devices and such!<BR><BR>DFI has <a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://sj.dfi.com.tw/press/Computex.asp">demo</a> at computex, this might interest you guys.

[Avid6eek]

This website a few weeks back also talked about 3GIO (PCI Express). Here it mentions the next generation PCI bus where basically everything switches from parallel to Serial. There it mentioned using serial connections to replace USB/Firewire. Considering that this technology can shrink the size of Mobos, make them cheaper, and better performers, it's makes me wonder why this technology is so slow to come along.

[Colin]

Actually motherboards with 3GIO should be here in Q3 this year! At least that's what everyone has been saying.<BR><BR>It takes a lot of time to develop new bus architectures, Intel doesn't want to design a new one every 10 years hopefully with 3GIO they can just modify it to keep up with the times. <BR><BR>But it sure is an exciting future! <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif" border="0">

[Avid6eek]

A new motherboard standard would be a welcomed developement. It's nice to get some performance improvement on computer components other that just CPU's, RAM, and VC's. If it is true that all these new technologies (3GIO/Serial ATA/DDR II) are coming out at around the same time the Hammer Core is released, along w/ all the new Direct X 9 Video cards, computers should have a huge performance leap. It'd be nice to get a 3DMark2001 score of 20,000 :-)

[Colin]

That's true, it's a very exciting time for the computer industry. I just hope all these new devices don't cost an arm and a leg!<BR><BR>Hey Shiznit I'll race ya to 20k! <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif" border="0">

[pegasus]

From my reading and talking with industry people, the issue boils down to the cost of implementation. The cost to deploy is a large factor. Consider that Maxtor is the only HDD mfg. supporting the ATA133 spec. When you start talking about throughput in a vacuum, you forget that dedicated video editing systems run a continuous througput rate of around 50mb/s to avoid dropping frames. This is accomplished with RAID arrays and storage over the network using Fibre Channel configurations. Given the investment by various industry players (like Sony, Apple, TI) in Firewire (upgraded spec coming soon) and the just released USB 2.0 solutions, I'd say that Serial ATA has some climbing to do. <BR><BR>There is more industry interest in providing a solution to the bottleneck at the mobo bus level than there is for another IDE interface standard that's going to place financial pressure on the already hard hit HDD mfgs. to retool to another IDE interface. The avg. user doesn't really use that kind of throughput as compression schemes and other approaches negate the need for them to have such throughput capacity in place. Anyone needed such dedicated throughput already has proven, stable solutions invested and aren't about to giveup that investment for Serial ATA. In that world, SCSI owns IDE hands down. It's the installed solution for professional users. The network storage issue isn't going to be cracked by Serial ATA anytime soon either. It's a solution looking for a reason to exist.

[Avid6eek]

"MSI Launches KT4 Ultra Mainboard Advancing to the AGP 8x, DDR400 and Serial ATA" <BR><BR>My question about Serial ATA I posted not to long ago has been answered......MSI has released a board supporting Serial ATA 150MB/sec transfer rate. Kinda makes you wanna eat your words pegasus.<BR><BR>Colin....unlike you I don't have the money, or an hardware website to be able to build ultimate 3D Machines.....I only update my Mobo/CPU/RAM about once every year to year and a half. I can keep a fast computer (far faster than the average gamers computer) for much less if I don't buy the best things. As soon as I can get my hands on a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 I'll buy that.....I can overclock it to perform almost as fast as the 4600, but save $250 :-) So i'll LET YOU get to 20,000 3DMarks first....after all, I don't want to make the webmaster look bad.

[Avid6eek]

Just found a new SOYO board that runs Serial ATA.......Better performance, nice slim cables so you don't need so much room in your case for those big as hell Parallel cables<img src="http://www.ocworkbench.com/computex2002/day2/p6040977.jpg"><img src="http://www.ocworkbench.com/computex2002/day2/p6040979.jpg">

[Avid6eek]

Oh ************************....found one from Asus too!!<BR><BR><img src="http://www.ocworkbench.com/computex2002/day1/PDRM1069.jpg">

[Avid6eek]

More than half of the Socket 754 Boards I've seen (AMD K8 CPU aka Hammer) support Serial ATA<BR><BR>****So much for your opinion Pegasus****<BR><BR>Now if only these boards would have the 3GIO Interface, I'd be ready to upgrade!

[Colin]

Thanks for the scoopage Shiznit!! <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif" border="0"><BR><BR>SErial ATA has huge potential, I can't wait for it to be released. It'll surely give SCSI a good run for its money.<BR><BR>3GIO should be out by the end of htis year, so it will be a nice time for upgrades! <img src="i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif" border="0">