[PLUG] SATA Drives?

[Bradford Siemssen]

On Saturday, September 20, 2003, at 02:02 PM, Wil Cooley wrote:

> After having had my prejudices against IDE drives confirmed by Larry 
> and
> the papers Galen posted, I'm wondering where SATA drives fall.  I'm
> seeing them offered in a lot of higher-end systems and with RAID
> controllers and they're only slightly less expensive than SCSI.  I 
> don't
> know much about them, other than they're somehow ATA interfaces adapted
> to a serial bus, like SSA or FCAL.  Are they being designed and
> manufactured as Enterprise Storage devices, or Personal Storage?  Are
> they so expensive just because they're still new?

It depends.

Maxtor, and Seagate have gone the low price road. Their drives are 
their better consumer grade drives (7200RPM 8MB Cache) repackaged to 
use SATA. Internally, many of their drives are really, old parallel IDE 
electronics, that have a SATA to PATA (Parallel ATA, or old IDE) 
converter added. Drives that use the SATA to PATA route will not be 
able to take advantage of the full 150MBps data rate that SATA allows, 
but the drives were typically, Ultra ATA 133, so they do get close.

Future iterations of drives from Seagate and Maxtor will eventually 
take better advantage of SATA and should get to where they can send the 
full 150MBps. The current price premium on SATA versus PATA is ~$30.

So for Seagate and Maxtor, SATA will filter from the top of the 
consumer market to down like all Ultra ATA 133, and Ultra ATA 100 
before it.

Western Digital is different. Initially, Western Digital decided to use 
SATA as an enterprise type of drive. The first Western Digital SATA 
drive was a 10K RPM ~36GB drive that costs almost as much as similar 
SCSI drives. I've recently seen advertisements for Western Digital 80GB 
drives with 8MB cache, for about $30 more than the PATA version of a 
similar drive. Which looks like more of a simple repackaging of current 
IDE offerings. So who knows.

It seems that SATA is going to be for both high and low end drives.

What I think will be the biggest pain for dealing with SATA is that 
there is only one drive per IDE channel. While this does mean no more 
dealing with master/slave/cable select, it also means motherboard 
manufacturers will need to put more channels on. The standard two 
channels just isn't going to cut it. Until that happens PCI SATA card 
makers will be happy.

All this to get rid of those short fat IDE ribbon cables....sigh...

  Cheers,
Brad

_____________________________
Brad Siemssen
Strongbox Network Services
www.strongboxnetworks.com
brad at strongboxnetworks.com
503.466.1416


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