» Serial ATA «

Also check out under Chipsets and Motherboards supporting this new technology

See also: Hard Drives and Hard Drive Manufacturers

This page was part of the HD section but as it's ready for market I've given it it's own page.

Serial ATA drives were also reviewed a while back at Tom's Hardware and more recently at Intels November 2002 IDF. The 1.2Mb .pdf review can be considered essential reading. "Serial ATA: Next Generation Storage Arrives" [broken link]

Next year new chipsets and southbridges such as Intel's ICH5 and VIA's VT8236/8238 are introduced as these will also support Serial ATA.   Companies like Highpoint Technologies are already bringing devices to the market, including a clever little parallel-serial ATA converter.

As a point of note, whilst waiting for Seagates Serial ATA drives promised for this fall, I am currently pushing the Seagate 7200 rpm 80Gb drives and pointedly slagging off the entire range of current IBM hard drives...

September 2003
Nvidia joins Serial ATA II working group
Found a nice newsbyte over at PC Pro. Apparently Nvidia has joined the Serial ATA II Working Group.
The Serial ATA II Working Group was formed in February 2002 to build on the existing SATA spec

August 2003
Using them myself and extolling the virtues of SATA to all and sundry but, there's an amazing number of box shifter class distributers who either can't get or won't stock these beauties.
Daft, I say, leaves smaller resellers opening multiple accounts to get the right product mix which can have a knock on effect to their credit rating as it makes the distributers nervous when someone opens credit account with a score of places. Vicious circle. Naturally the added effect of carriage costs takes its toll too. It was the same when I had a high street presence a decade ago but at least there was margins and less competition then...
*Sigh*

May 2003
Given I'm a Seagate Partner I should ignore the any other flavour of hard drive but that's hardly my way. Anyhow, [ http://www.ocaddiction.com/reviews/hd/maxtor_160gb_sata/ ]OC Addiction did a sterling review of Maxtors 160Gb SATA offering. Pretty much impressed. Me? I'm gonna review the quieter Seagate SATA drive later this month

(Aug 2004) Redirects towards [ www.devhardware.com ]
April 2003
Not seen them in the channel yet but a Seagate mailshot in the mornings post has the SATA Barracuda's up to 160Gb. WooHoo!

There's come excellent prices in the channel too. Next month, depending on chip availability I'll be building a show piece using these with the Canterwood boards, 1Gb of TwinX Corsair DDR and a 800Mhz 3Ghz P4. I can't wait!


SATA II anyone?
The inquirer article is actually headlined "SATA II is here" but I'm not having it. If Seagate had SATA II samples outside of prototypes I'd fairly sure I'd have heard something about it. What the article actually says is that Marvell "has already started sampling SATA II chips."

Apparently the company makes interfaces for both sides of the cable, motherboard/card based host controllers and drive-side. Visit Marvell for Press Releases and further info


March 2003 Seems I've been waiting forever to get my hands on one of these. Originally I was told first week in November, 2002. The latest date from Seagates reseller manager the end off this month*, we can hope!
Dabs has a "long lead time" but list the 120Gb Baraccuda V's at only £128.50 ex vat
* Given as third week in March, 2003.

Meanwhile Hardware Analysis give details of Western Digital's introduction of 10,000-rpm Serial-ATA Harddisks. These will only be 36Gb initially though.

December 2002
Seagate already have 120Gb drives to market and I believe WD are working on a 200Gb model. Links to follow shortly.

I'll put links to UK sources in the UK shortly. Meantime, you local reseller should be able to order them from Ingram Micro who have stocks.

Stateside the Barracuda 80GB (EIDE, Serial ATA, 7200 RPM. Part Number: ST380023AS) sells for as little as $ 124.40 (£78) with the average being around $135.

August 2002
Eh up, Shuttle have a Serial ATA board on the market, compliments of a SIS 648 chipset. Check out the review over at Toms Hardware

Note that this fall, Seagate will begin shipping a Baracuda drive with the SATA interface.

Aopen have announced the world's first serial ATA notherboard with Intel 845E chipset - the AX4B-533 Plus

Needless to say SIS are pushing their market lead with the impressive SIS648 chipset and the list of vendors is growing. I've put a list of them on the motherboards page under SIS648..

Bandwidth:

Serial ATA 1.0   -   Data rate: 150Mb/s   -   Bus speed: 1.5Gb/s   -   Expected: Fall 2002
This is the about to be released (Sept 2002). All things considered and suitably benchmarked, this is on a par with current ATA 133 drives on the market, give or take the odd 5% depending what test is being run.

Serial ATA 2.0   -   Data rate: 300Mb/s   -   Bus speed: 3Gb/s   -   Expected: Mid 2004
Not only bigger, better faster but with enhance intelligence. My money was on before next christmas rather than 2004 but I guess it's all going to tie in with Intel's Tejas and Grantsdale combo, and PCI-Express and DDR-II.
Might as well have all the system singing at the same full throttle, eh

Addenda: Closer to the mark I guess. It's likely for a december 2004 release. The first i915 / i925 Grantdale, Aldershot motherboards don't support it, but I very much expect a board revision towards year end to take this into account and, equally to the point, a faster 1066Mhz FSB (or better).

Serial ATA 3.0   -   Data rate: 600Mb/s   -   Bus speed: 6Gb/s   -   Expected: Mid 2007

Lower voltage:

Parallel ATA is based on TTL signaling, needing input signals as high as 5 volts. In the near future, IC manufacturers will move to fine lithographies which cannot tolerate 5 volt signaling tolerance. Serial ATA addresses these integration issues by reducing the signaling voltages to approximately 250 millivolts. Less is more.

Pin efficiency:

The parallel ATA has 26 signal pins going into the interface chip, while Serial ATA uses only 4 pins, improving the pin efficiency and accommodating a highly integrated chip implementation.

Improved cable and connector plant:

The current parallel ATA cable is a bulky cable nest made up of unwieldy 80 conductor ribbon cables and 40 pin header connectors. Instead Serial ATA uses a much smaller 7 pin serial cable. This helps eliminate the cabling mess and improves the system's airflow and cooling and offers more flexibility in chassis design.

Master-Slave interaction:

With current parallel ATA, pairs of devices share a common cable in a master-slave relationship, resulting in the bandwidth being shared between the devices. Additionally, it can be a begger to set up, both in terms of jumpers and the spaghetti factor.

By contrast, Serial ATA is a point-to-point interface with each device directly connected to the host via a dedicated link, thus each device has the entire interface bandwidth and there is no conflict between devices. This means software can be streamlined, eliminating the overhead associated with coordinating accesses between the master and slave device sharing the same cable.

Hot-Plug Functionality:

Serial ATA includes all the mechanical and electrical features necessary to allow devices insert directly into the cases while the system is running ("hot-plugged").

 Check out the the Serial ATA Working Group

Intel: Serial ATA Poised For Market Ramp


SEAGATE:
Seagate, Intel And Silicon Image Unveil New Serial ATA II Capabilities

Serial ATA "Plugfest" Verifies Serial ATA Interoperability Industry-Wide

InfoWorld completed an article that looked at the technological impact of Serial ATA and gave it the same respect as SCSI and Fibre Channel.

Here's the low down on the SATA Barracuda ATA V- available soon in 80Gb and 120Gb flavours. I spoke to Seagate UK this morning (10th Sept 2002) and they confirmed that these drives will definitely be in the channel for the first week of November. The premium over ATA 100 is a paltry $5. The rounded cables you can get for standard IDE cost twice that!


MAXTOR:
[ broken link ] Serial ATA Overview

[ broken link ] Serial ATA Working Group

[ broken link ] Press releases

[ broken link ] Serial ATA White Paper - very good reading!

CONTROLLER CARDS
A number of firms including Adaptec are producing Serial ATA host and RAID controller cards.

October 2002
Can't find anything solid yet for releases SATA of Maxtor, nor Western Digital and I couldn't care less about IBM who have (since) sold up to Hitachi in any case.

As for Fujitsu I wouldn't trust them nor any of their products as far as I could spit into a gale!
It appears to many (myself especially as I've had bad experiences several times before), lied to channel and tried to cover up HUGE numbers of faulty drives and when the cat was out the bag have to renege on warranties.
Blah! Printable words fail me!