Serial ATA Hard Drives -What's up with that?

[BoulderHead]

I saw an advertisement claiming 1.5Gbps could be obtained from this new? hard drive technology. Sounds pretty fast to me. Anybody have one or know more about it? Will it be a cornerstone for the next wave of computer advancement?

 

[Adam]

Oh gosh I hope so!

 

[MacTech]

Yes it will.. but it will take probably a long time to go main stream.. kinda like pc makers execpt for apple, killing the floppy.

I bet apple will be the first for serial ata.

 

[damgo]

^^^^ Naa, it's too cheap... I predict Apple will try to market Super-Ultra-Mega-Jumbo-Wide-FireWire with the same performace but twice the cost.

It should hit soon, but physical hard drive access is now, and will continue to be, the speed-limiting factor. The ATA speed is just how fast the computer can get info from the drive to memory/CPU; except for a brief period around when the first Ultra-ATA came out, the drive itself has run much slower than this.

 

[BoulderHead]

I'm thinking of buying one just to play with the thing. Some company called Best Buy seems to have teamed up with Seagate in an effort to market them. My time is getting short and I need to save every millisecond I can.

More info;
http://www.bestbuy.com/Detail.asp?m=488&cat=511&scat=512&e=11209775

 

[russ_watters]

It should hit soon, but physical hard drive access is now, and will continue to be, the speed-limiting factor. The ATA speed is just how fast the computer can get info from the drive to memory/CPU; except for a brief period around when the first Ultra-ATA came out, the drive itself has run much slower than this.

Yup. Therein lies the problem. SATA will do little to change the actual performance of hard drives.

 

[BoulderHead]

So I should save my money then?

 

[damgo]

Maybe; I would. First remember that you need a serial-ATA capable motherboard (or IDE controller card) otherwise the serial-ATA on the drive is useless. Then, you want to look at the drive's specs for the physical disk transfer rate (not the buffer/cache rate!). That'll tell you how fast the disk can read data... plain old ultra ATA is around 100 Mbps now, maybe higher, so if the disk's rate is lower than this, the serial ATA is useless.

For general advice on these issues
www.tomshardware.com
www.anandtech.com
are good.

 

[BoulderHead]

Thanks damgo,
You got it through my thick head what I had been confused about, which was the difference between the drive's specs for the physical disk transfer rate and the buffer/cache rate. I was mixing the two up and thinking they had come up with a faster way to take data off the disk when what seems to be going on is just a faster way to transfer data to and from the buffer.
What a bummer, I thought they were really on to something here, lol.