3Ware Serial ATA Raid controller

[Pariah]

Saw this over at SR, but they didn't link to all the pictures for some reason:

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pic 10(I don't have the slighest idea who would be able to use one of these. What kind of freakish case can you put that many parallel ATA drives in and be able to route the cables?)
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[pillage2001]

Impressive scores he got there. Would it still be the same for our HD with the converter on or do we have to buy new drives with Serial ATA technology to get the transfer rate?

 

[mcveigh]

very nice!!

3ware is a great company with great tech support, i can't wait till this is out!!

 

[Lord Evermore]

For those that would like to see the source.

Given that the test shown there is with an adapter on a parallel ATA drive, I would presume that your scores would be similar (relative to the actual performance of your drive compared to the drive used in these tests). I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing though that the adapter requires a power input; we don't really need more stuff using power in a system.

SerialATA won't really change performance much, not for awhile after it's released. Parallel ATA is at 133MBps, and no drive can match that even in burst speeds. Most drives can't even beat ATA33 in streaming data. SerialATA's first version in fact I think is only going to be 150MBps, so even the maximum burst won't be much higher (and by the time parts are actually available, parallel ATA may have caught up to that). SerialATA however has advantages over parallel ATA which will mean it'll eventually become the standard.

Dell SerialATA info

That article is pretty easy to read. Obviously they were a little too optimistic about how soon SerialATA would become available, since they thought ATA100 would be the last parallel interface and after that SerialATA would become the standard.

When SerialATA was first announced, I thought it sounded like a stupid idea. Mainly because it was obviously going to be several years before it became available, and the specs on performance really didn't look all that impressive compared to Ultra-ATA modes (and still doesn't). But the other improvements make it obvious that it is where things need to be headed. The info in the Dell article regarding voltages and chip sizes, that's stuff people don't even think about, but even just the cable issues are enough to make it worth moving to SerialATA as long as performance is the same or better.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

I can honestly say that few things have me as excited as serial ATA. The HDD has been a serious bottleneck for the last few years now. Not only will serial ATA drives open up more bandwidth, but the cabling nightmares of the past are just that...the past!

 

[Lord Evermore]

The hard drive bottleneck is still going to exist. SerialATA does introduce a few features similar to SCSI, like command queuing, but the drives themselves are still going to be the same mechanically, which means they'll still be limited in how much data they can stream. Burst transfers will possibly get a boost, but whether that helps anyone is dependent on how they use the drive.

Since SerialATA doesn't use master/slave natively, you can have 4 drives all as master rather than the way the current ATA does it, so that will help in cases where people are stuck putting slow drives on the same cable as faster drives. I'd hoped some sort of daisy-chaining would be possible with SerialATA, kind of annoying to have to have another port for every drive you want to use (whereas with SCSI you just get a cable with enough connectors).

Overall though, don't expect tremendously amazing changes with SerialATA at first. I also noticed in the spec that the SerialATA power connector is even bigger than the standard power connector, and there'll probably end up being a jumper or adapter for that anyway, so there'll end up being adapter/cable jumbles at the backs of drives.

 

[mcveigh]

I just want easier cabling and no more master slave issues

 

[Lord Evermore]

I wasn't aware there were "issues" with master/slave, other than having to set a jumper before you install the drive. Whether a drive is master or slave, as far as I know, really doesn't matter to the way they function as far as the user is concerned.

The cables however are a big improvement.

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
I wasn't aware there were "issues" with master/slave, other than having to set a jumper before you install the drive. Whether a drive is master or slave, as far as I know, really doesn't matter to the way they function as far as the user is concerned.

The cables however are a big improvement.

I just hate setting the jumpers or trying to figure out why one drive has to be slave and the other cable select for some weird problem to go away.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

lookin pretty good. in a perfect world i would use scsi and cheetah x15 36lp drives, but unfortunately that is way too expensive. serial ATA looks cool, if only for the smaller cables and no jumpers.

as far as this being some big speed increase, um, no

 

[Woodchuck2000]

It's worth getting excited for, if only because it's the end of worrying about mixing drives in different transfer modes...
And I agree about jumpers being annoying btw...

 

[McCarthy]

The performance increase is minimal as it's not parallel ATA holding our drives back, it's our drives themselves that are the bottleneck. What it will bring is a lot of dongles being sold, new power supplies (serial ATA drives require a new 15 pin connector, unless they changed that part of the design) and more cost per motherboard to supply the same number of ATA channels as serial ATA provides 1 channel per controller vs 2 channels in master/slave per controller with parallel ATA. This is unless everyone agrees to sell their new serial ATA controller chips for half of what they charge for parallel ATA controller chips. True, the connectors take less board space and the traces are fewer and more easily routed, but there will have to be more of them.

Nice pic of that new power connector here.
The article writer seems to envision serial ATA taking over the world and moving SCSI aside.

As for the voltage concerns mentioned, these are in reference to the future limitations of parallel ATA - which we aren't even close to. While we will get there eventually as drives finally catch up to the ATA bus, be it parallel or serial, there's no rush.

Smart command queuing is part of the serial ATA II spec. Is II the one that's going to be rolled out to start with?

I guess I just expected more somehow. In an era of 15 devices per SCSI channel, 63 per 1394, 127 per USB....1 per serial ATA controller seems rather the wrong direction. And if we're going to require new power connectors and part of the goal is to clean up cabling, why not put the power wires and data wires all in the same cable as the spec? Personally I find routing power wires to be just as much of a pain as parallel ATA cables at this point and the power cables will be even more of a nuicense when serial ATA makes the data cable less obtrusive.

--Mc

 

[sMashPiranha]

Is it true that the recording/music/movies/etc industry wants to have copy protection built into S-ATA hardware? I was at a thing last year looking at server technology and the guy that was telling us about S-ATA was saying something about this.

 

[robg1701]

Couldnt they could make a small adapter for the power ? Its just a new molex afterall, the voltages are still coming from the same 4 wires surely ? If there's gonna be parrallel to serial connectors for the drives, surely they can handle the power too ?

 

[jm0ris0n]

All I care about is longer, thinner cables! If a pack of 4 converters and a ATASerial PCI 4 port card + the cables themselves became available for under $125 before August I'd snatch it up in a second

 

[Lord Evermore]

The advantage of having one meter cables is somewhat dulled by the fact that you can only get one device on the cable. How many people have a case where they need to mount a hard drive, CD drive or a Zip drive a meter away, even after routing the cables out of the way? Even with a controller at the bottom of a motherboard, it's a rare case that's a meter tall. If the 1 meter limit came with the ability to connect multiple devices, like SCSI, it would be much more advantageous. For many people an 18 inch IDE cable is only limited because they have to route the cable back and forth for the primary and secondary devices. If the spec were modified to allow even 24 inch cables as a standard, with two devices, there'd be almost no problems with it.

The media industries want copy protection built into ALL computer hardware that could potentially be used for copying media, not just SerialATA. They'd like things like the controller to first have to verify whether you're allowed to read or store a particular piece of material.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
The advantage of having one meter cables is somewhat dulled by the fact that you can only get one device on the cable. How many people have a case where they need to mount a hard drive, CD drive or a Zip drive a meter away, even after routing the cables out of the way? Even with a controller at the bottom of a motherboard, it's a rare case that's a meter tall. If the 1 meter limit came with the ability to connect multiple devices, like SCSI, it would be much more advantageous. For many people an 18 inch IDE cable is only limited because they have to route the cable back and forth for the primary and secondary devices. If the spec were modified to allow even 24 inch cables as a standard, with two devices, there'd be almost no problems with it.

The media industries want copy protection built into ALL computer hardware that could potentially be used for copying media, not just SerialATA. They'd like things like the controller to first have to verify whether you're allowed to read or store a particular piece of material.

I dont have drives 1 m away, but 18" are a huge problem in my case. 1 m thin cables are the one most important thing about serial ATA IMO. Sure 150 MB/s is nice for the future, but I don't give a damn at the moment.

Anyways, I generally don't have drives doubled up on my cables. I have two hard drives and up until recently had two ROM drives internally, each with it's own ATA channel. The two hard drives were on my Promise Ultra ATA 66 card and my ROM drives were on the ATA 33 on the mobo.

Lately however, I've been using external Firewire peripherals, since I can use the same drives with multiple computers. It will be interesting to see what Intel pushes with serial ATA. It's built for internal drives, but rumour has it that they're gonna push it for some external devices as well. It offers the advantage of speed (even with current drives) over both Firewire and USB 2., but overall I still think for external, Firewire is better since Firewire offers powered cables and daisychaining. Once Firewire 2 is available the speed advantage (for real life usage) will be diminished for serial ATA. That said, specifically for hard drives and potentially some storage devices in some situations, exteral serial ATA is an attractive option.

 

[LordOfAll]

The purpose of the new power connector is for hot swapping the drive. Notice that some of the pins are shorter than others. At least it will keep stupid people from ruining drives by unplugging them in a running machine.

 

[sharkeeper]

LOL, he tested it with an old system there! That card should go in a 66MHz 64bit slot to see what kind of bandwidth you get from four drives (IBM 120GXP) striped!

Cheers!

 

[MichaelD]

Bump for an extremely interesting thread. Nice article, BTW, McCarthy. I'm taking notes. Most of it is over my head, but I'm taking 'dem notes.

 

[ProviaFan]

Wow, that's looking good. I'd love to have that RAID controller + 4 Serial ATA HDs.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Can't wait for these to start rolling out by year's end. My next HDD's will be serial!

 

[Acanthus]

in all honesty i see nothing exciting about this article, sure the burst transfer rates can get to 150MB/sec but look at it from this perspective, how often does an ATA133 drive operate at 133MB/sec? damn near never, i wont be concerned with buying a new HDD until they get better seeks or a whole lot more space, or more sustained throughput. A single SATA drive in the real world of computing will only cause a margainal performance gain. The cables are much nicer though -Acanthus-