SATA is obviously the way of the future, and adds a lot of features that ATA/133 doesnt.
I hope that Apple supports big drives soon.
The only reason I can see them holding back is that the drive caddies for the xserve are designed for a parallel interface, and if they want to use them in a Desktop, or upgrade the xserve they will need to use an adapter to maintain compatibility, which is an ugly solution.
The Xserve supports ATA/133 in the latest rev.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple rework the drives in the Xserve. The Xserve as it stands is a proof-of-concept device, IMO. I think they're perfectly willing to rework it substantially to meet future customer needs. On that note, maybe I should invest in two more 120GB drives for my dual 1 GHz while they're still available...
Thanks for the prices. I didn't know there was such a disparity in prices. $40-50 more for the same Mechanism with a SATA interface. That's highway robbery! You will get NO speed increase unless you able to run the drives in a RAID configuration that can support more than 150MBps throughput.
Once again ..."The King has no clothes"
Look again. The smaller Seagate only has 2 MB of cache for the U-ATA while the S-ATA has 8 MB. All S-ATA drives also support command-queuing and other nice features. It's only the Maxtor drive that is a rip-of (we don't know the difference between the drives for sure). We still have about 2 months before we might see any type of Apple hardware announcement, possibly quite a bit longer than that. Serial ATA is on PCs now. It's only getting cheaper. It doesn't make sense for Apple not to include it. It doesn't mean we won't be seeing 40-pin ATA connectors on Macs in the next revision, especially since Serial ATA doesn't support ATAPI right now. My guess is two Serial ATA connectors + two traditional ATA connectors...all built-in to the same ASIC.
I'd like to see some benchmarks of those drives too.
S-ATA sounds good, cheap, and less of a headache to upgrade down the road. No real reasons NOT to use it.
plus, Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
S-ATA sounds good, cheap, and less of a headache to upgrade down the road. No real reasons NOT to use it.
plus, Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
It really makes more sense to put an ATA/133 chip set on the board even though the optical drives won't utilize the speed because they are the chip set in current volume production (cost) and because using an ATA/133 chip set allows the installation of (legacy) PATA hard drives and such which can use the speed and "big drive" capability that ATA/66 lacks.
There is some doubt that the optical drives will change to SATA until the next major revision which is due with the blue light laser upgrade (the one that will be affordable). That would be the time I would expect a redesign of them, though I have not seen any actual reports to this effect.
Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
Fanless computers love small cables too. The PowerMacs are pretty good, but I would think that the Xserve and future cube/iMac designs would head in this direction (including the optical device interface), if for no other reason than to increase circulation inside the machines. If the Xserve transitions to dual 970s I can see Apple wanting to eliminate all the internal restrictions it can.
It really makes more sense to put an ATA/133 chip set on the board even though the optical drives won't utilize the speed because they are the chip set in current volume production (cost) and because using an ATA/133 chip set allows the installation of (legacy) PATA hard drives and such which can use the speed and "big drive" capability that ATA/66 lacks.
One of the most important features contributing to the success of Serial ATA is its backwards compatibility with Ultra ATA. It is particularly interesting that the current crop of Serial ATA controllers works fine with conventional UltraATA/133 hard disks (or older). Not only are there motherboards available with Serial ATA and Ultra ATA/133 connectors, there are also standalone Serial ATA controllers on the market that use adapters to work with conventional ATA drives.
The downside of the conversion is a performance hit. Although we will not see chipsets with integrated Serial PTA controllers until the spring, many of the current models lose a major portion of their potential performance when required to convert from parallel to serial transmission (see the Benchmarks section). Fortunately, this doesn't matter too much in practice, as the remaining bandwidth is still sufficient to handle the throughput of today's hard drives.
Comments
Originally posted by mmmpie
SATA is obviously the way of the future, and adds a lot of features that ATA/133 doesnt.
I hope that Apple supports big drives soon.
The only reason I can see them holding back is that the drive caddies for the xserve are designed for a parallel interface, and if they want to use them in a Desktop, or upgrade the xserve they will need to use an adapter to maintain compatibility, which is an ugly solution.
The Xserve supports ATA/133 in the latest rev.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple rework the drives in the Xserve. The Xserve as it stands is a proof-of-concept device, IMO. I think they're perfectly willing to rework it substantially to meet future customer needs. On that note, maybe I should invest in two more 120GB drives for my dual 1 GHz while they're still available...
Originally posted by hmurchison
Netro
Thanks for the prices. I didn't know there was such a disparity in prices. $40-50 more for the same Mechanism with a SATA interface. That's highway robbery! You will get NO speed increase unless you able to run the drives in a RAID configuration that can support more than 150MBps throughput.
Once again ..."The King has no clothes"
Look again. The smaller Seagate only has 2 MB of cache for the U-ATA while the S-ATA has 8 MB. All S-ATA drives also support command-queuing and other nice features. It's only the Maxtor drive that is a rip-of (we don't know the difference between the drives for sure). We still have about 2 months before we might see any type of Apple hardware announcement, possibly quite a bit longer than that. Serial ATA is on PCs now. It's only getting cheaper. It doesn't make sense for Apple not to include it. It doesn't mean we won't be seeing 40-pin ATA connectors on Macs in the next revision, especially since Serial ATA doesn't support ATAPI right now. My guess is two Serial ATA connectors + two traditional ATA connectors...all built-in to the same ASIC.
I'd like to see some benchmarks of those drives too.
Here's a reason wy Serial ATA rules: AsusBoards review of WD Raptors on Intel's ICH5R
plus, Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
Originally posted by Matsu
S-ATA sounds good, cheap, and less of a headache to upgrade down the road. No real reasons NOT to use it.
plus, Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
It really makes more sense to put an ATA/133 chip set on the board even though the optical drives won't utilize the speed because they are the chip set in current volume production (cost) and because using an ATA/133 chip set allows the installation of (legacy) PATA hard drives and such which can use the speed and "big drive" capability that ATA/66 lacks.
There is some doubt that the optical drives will change to SATA until the next major revision which is due with the blue light laser upgrade (the one that will be affordable). That would be the time I would expect a redesign of them, though I have not seen any actual reports to this effect.
Originally posted by Matsu
Apple lurves small cables, and they can keep a legacy ATA-66 on the Mobo jusr for optical devices, a move that costs them nothing since they already do that on the pMac mobo's.
Fanless computers love small cables too. The PowerMacs are pretty good, but I would think that the Xserve and future cube/iMac designs would head in this direction (including the optical device interface), if for no other reason than to increase circulation inside the machines. If the Xserve transitions to dual 970s I can see Apple wanting to eliminate all the internal restrictions it can.
Originally posted by RBR
It really makes more sense to put an ATA/133 chip set on the board even though the optical drives won't utilize the speed because they are the chip set in current volume production (cost) and because using an ATA/133 chip set allows the installation of (legacy) PATA hard drives and such which can use the speed and "big drive" capability that ATA/66 lacks.
Don't be surprised if Apple doesn't do this.
From a Tom's Hardware Article:
One of the most important features contributing to the success of Serial ATA is its backwards compatibility with Ultra ATA. It is particularly interesting that the current crop of Serial ATA controllers works fine with conventional UltraATA/133 hard disks (or older). Not only are there motherboards available with Serial ATA and Ultra ATA/133 connectors, there are also standalone Serial ATA controllers on the market that use adapters to work with conventional ATA drives.
The downside of the conversion is a performance hit. Although we will not see chipsets with integrated Serial PTA controllers until the spring, many of the current models lose a major portion of their potential performance when required to convert from parallel to serial transmission (see the Benchmarks section). Fortunately, this doesn't matter too much in practice, as the remaining bandwidth is still sufficient to handle the throughput of today's hard drives.