OMFG when will Apple add at least ATA/100?

Yet hard drives still top out at 33.

[quote]Originally posted by artenman:
<strong>OMFG when will Apple add at least ATA/100?
It's insane they still have ATA/66!! </strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes for sure, because the prize of the ATA 100 will become slower than the prize of ATA 66 soon. (it's just like memory, an EDO memory cost much more than 133 mhz SDRAM : just a matter of industrial mass production).
Concerning the speed i disagree with recent HD ATA 33 is not any more sufficient. For ATA 100 versus ATA 66 the discussion is more open.

Do you have any evidence this would speed up you day to day computing fast enough to notice? I've read that it's hard to saturate the ATA 100 bus as it is.

If you don't then all you're looking for is something to make up for other short comings you may have. Do you own a SUV?

Laugh. I'm kidding.

ATA/66 can handle any 7200RPM drive out there, plus an optical drive - and that's what it has to handle in a Mac. Rule #1 of good engineering: Don't put anything in that isn't necessary. As powerdoc suggests, they'll probably move to ATA/100 when the chipsets are as cheap or cheaper than ATA/66.

Apple could probably get a bigger performance boost by slipping an embedded processor onto the motherboard to arbitrate the bus, freeing the CPU to crunch numbers. I'm not sure how feasible that is, from either a cost or engineering point of view, but it would help, especially when the virtual memory system was getting thrashed.

&lt;sigh&gt; when will Computer users stop focusing on the Marketing and pay attention to realworld gains. I mean no disrespect to the initial poster but the PC market is a whole different animal. Since every manufacturer is basically selling the same box they love to tout "features" that don't necessarily make a difference but help their "marketability". Hence you will soon see PC's touting ATA 133 even though very expensive RAID systems don't always supply that much throughput. Heck is speed is all you want go buy an UltraSCSI 320 card. Nothing beats bragging about 320MB per second theoretical throughput

yeah, I was on Maxtor's site the other day and if I remember correctly I read that the read/write speed of both ATA/100 and ATA/133 (on their fastest drives) was at about 46MB/sec, which is still less than what an ATA/66 can push.

Good question. I've often wondered why ATA 10k RPM drives are not available. In the PC market onboard RAID has become popular. If Apple was to move towards a Dual Controller with RAID features that would be value added to many such as yourself and Digital Audio/Video mavens. I really hope the fun starts with Serial ATA. Everything else seems to be just a stop gap.

SCSI's big advantage is that the SCSI bus handles arbitration - basically, which data goes where, and when. What that means, in a nutshell, is that the rest of the system only has to send data to, and read data from, the SCSI bus without worrying about whether or how or when it gets sent across the bus. (Its other big advantages are that more devices can be connected to the same bus than ATA allows, they don't have to be in a master/slave relationship, and the cables connecting the devices can be longer.)

IDE and its variants (including ATA) lean on the CPU for that. Offloading the work of bus arbitration makes IDE/ATA simpler and cheaper, but it also cramps CPU performance (which, to Intel, isn't really a disadvantage - it just means you have to buy a faster processor). The faster ATA gets, the more of a load it puts on the CPU. If the drives on the ATA bus are getting hammered, CPU performance suffers. Conversely, if the CPU's already loaded down, disk performance can suffer. There's no point in using ATA for really high performance disk access.

SCSI is independent. That means it's expensive - more so as it's able to connect more devices with wider, longer cables at higher speeds - but it also means that both the SCSI bus and the rest of the system can run at full speed. If you want no-apologies performance, you want SCSI.

Also, there are issues of scale and quality: Many more IDE drives are sold than SCSI, which favors IDE pricewise. Also, anyone who's buying a SCSI drive at this point is already paying a premium to get something that will be used in a clutch situation, so the drives themselves are almost certainly build to higher standards of quality than the good-enough models that ship with IDE/ATA interfaces.

artenman:

Maybe if you said to the ladies you had a HD with 528Mbit/sec (ATA 66*8) transfer rate it would make you feel better.

Whatever happened to internal firewire drives?

He he he I hear you. With all the HD options out there, leave it to the high geek engineers the figure out which is best (and then us marketing types to pick the coolest sounding one!)

[quote]Whatever happened to internal firewire drives?<hr></blockquote>

Ask the hard drive manufacturers.

I believe Maxtor had a FW mechanism in the pipe a while back, but no-one's seen it yet. I think this is a chicken-and-egg problem: There are no computers that can accomodate FW internal drives (with the insufficient exception of the first PMG4s) so there are no native FW drives, so there are no computers that can accomodate FW internal drives...

For the current market, bridged IDE drives seem to be satisfying demand. I don't think native FW mechanisms will appear until Apple partners with a HDD/optical drive manufacturer and makes it happen.

Actually Amorph, there are third party FireWire PCI cards that have both internal and external bus for firewire. My card has an internal plug.

Yes, but an aftermarket option can't generate that much demand, especially when it competes with an entrenched standard. There are internal IDE connectors in every personal computer ever shipped for the last how many years, and the IDE drive mechanisms were perfected (and the research paid for) years ago. So what incentive is there to start producing FW mechanisms?

Think about it: USB was available for how long before USB peripherals came out in earnest? What finally coaxed the peripheral makers to adopt it?

Apple would have to do something like it did with USB on the iMac: drop IDE and go with FW as the internal drive connection standard. Since drives are crucial to the operation of the computer, however, they'd have to make sure a native FW drive was available first. They couldn't do that without teaming up with someone, helping to pay for the research, and probably making the partner a sole supplier for X amount of time to reduce the risk involved in adopting the new standard.

[edit: I write english real good. Sheesh!]

[ 11-27-2001: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>Offloading the work of bus arbitration makes IDE/ATA simpler and cheaper, but it also cramps CPU performance (which, to Intel, isn't really a disadvantage - it just means you have to buy a faster processor). The faster ATA gets, the more of a load it puts on the CPU. If the drives on the ATA bus are getting hammered, CPU performance suffers. Conversely, if the CPU's already loaded down, disk performance can suffer. There's no point in using ATA for really high performance disk access.</strong><hr></blockquote>

This brings up an interesting question I've had for some time. Does the CPU still get hammered even if the high-speed HD's are running off of an external ATA controller PCI card or just when the ATA controller is integrated on the motherboard? Is there a such thing as an ATA controller card that truly controls the HD's on its own, sparing the CPU of any ATA processing loads? ...Or is that basically a SCSI setup then?