serial ata on a mobo, useful?

[Shadowgate]

i've seen a few motherboards offering serial ata support, but is this really going to be useful before you would need to upgrade again? i mean will there be drives available within the next 6 months? it seems like a tempting piece of technology, especially by getting rid of the damn ribbon cables. but if there aren't any drives available to take advantage of it then i don't see why it's so important now.

also, is it a technology that's only going to be used for hard drives? or are there cd/dvd drives in the works for it too?

 

[Rick67]

From what I understand, S-ATA will replace the IDE's in the near future.

 

[Buz2b]

I don't think there are any drives currently on the market but from what I understand, it will probably happen this fall. There should be a slow trickle of drive offerings pretty soon. Full market saturation will not be for some time though. I mean, what are you going to do with the "gazillions" of regular HDD's on the market now? Someone's got to buy them.

 

[Sunny129]

serial ATA drives are supposed to be hitting the market in 1-2 months. so it is definitely something i would look for in a mobo, since SATA is the future of ATA (they will be phasing out parallel ATA eventually). as far as all the parallel ATA drives still on the shelves worldwide, there are small adapters that connect to the pin array on the back of the drive. the other side has a SATA connector. this is a cheap solution for those who have serial ATA connectors on their mobos, but don't have a serial ATA drive. if the mobo comes w/out serial ATA, it will be much more expensive to get b/c it will have to come in the form of a PCI card adapter.

 

[IntelConvert]

It's been reported (on numerous sites) that the SATA drives are expected to be available in the Oct-Nov time-frame, but the inside scoop is that the first crop will not be any faster than the best of the current ATA drives and will cost about 10% more. That said, if I were looking at 2 mobos, with and without SATA (and everything else comparable), sure I'd go for SATA. While the skinny cables are nice, it's no big deal (unless you have multiple HDD's). The best reason however, is that we will see fast SATA drives next year!

 

[bolsen]

Originally posted by: IntelConvert
It's been reported (on numerous sites) that the SATA drives are expected to be available in the Oct-Nov time-frame, but the inside scoop is that the first crop will not be any faster than the best of the current ATA drives and will cost about 10% more. That said, if I were looking at 2 mobos, with and without SATA (and everything else comparable), sure I'd go for SATA. While the skinny cables are nice, it's no big deal (unless you have multiple HDD's). The best reason however, is that we will see fast SATA drives next year!

Serial ATA is the new money maker. As noted above, you will not see a real benefit from the devices now, but next year

And, the benefit of the smaller cables are found with multiple HDs. (Better air flow with lack of cables.)