Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware Technology

Serial ATA CD-Rom Drives? 70

Posted by Cliff from the when-will-the-market-catch-on dept.
OutRigged asks: "With Serial ATA hard drives starting to go mainstream, and being almost equal in price to their parallel equivalents, one would think we'd have Serial ATA CD-ROM drives by now. Yet wherever I look, all I see are PATA based CD-ROM drives. It's obvious that an optical drive will benefit little, if at all from using SATA, but why not switch for the sake of the cable size? CD-ROM drives are usually at the top of the case, and with the 1m limit in length, along with the small size of the cables, I see no reason not to use a Serial ATA interface in a CD-ROM drive."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Serial ATA CD-Rom Drives? More

Serial ATA CD-Rom Drives?

Comments Filter:

  • or... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Blob Pet ( 86206 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @01:53PM (#7916563) Homepage
    buy a converter
    • http://www.abit-usa.com/technology/serillel_new.ph p
      • From the abit website you linked to [abit-usa.com]:

        * Note: Compatible with SATA controller of Silicon Image on motherboard only!

        And that refers to using it on ATAPI devices. It's fine for hard drives on ANY SATA controller, but only on abit mobos with the SI controller.
    • Simple : most computers only come with two SATA ports on the motherboard and nobody wants to waste one of them on a CD-ROM, particularly if it means now they can't do RAID-0 using SATA drives for insanely fast throughput.

  • Your answer. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lafiel ( 667810 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @01:55PM (#7916595) Homepage
    Is pretty simple... extra cost.
    • Except it's not. People buy SATA hard drives even though they cost a little more. The extra cost is absorbed by the consumer, not the manufacturer.
    • Actually once the manufacturers get the inertia going SATA will be CHEAPER than PATA because of reduced part counts and other factors.
  • What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.
    • I don't have a DVD drive in my computer, it is attached via firewire :)
    • Good point. Not many people buy CD-ROM drives these days when you can get a DVD-ROM for a few bucks more.
    • no, no, i assure you... i too have yet to sucumb to the pleasures of a dvd drive.

    • Re:F*** that! (Score:1, Redundant)

      by Paladin128 ( 203968 )
      From the abit website you linked to:

      * Note: Compatible with SATA controller of Silicon Image on motherboard only!

      And that refers to using it on ATAPI devices. It's fine for hard drives on ANY SATA controller, but only on abit mobos with the SI controller.

    • Re:F*** that! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jonadab ( 583620 )
      > What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.

      No, I don't have one. Don't have any use for one. I do have a CD writer...

      If software ever starts coming on DVD instead of CD, maybe I'll have to
      get one, I'm not holding my breath. The CD is too standardized; it'll only
      be replaced by something that's a *lot* better (i.e., holds a *lot* more).
      In the early days of PCs, people would by incremental upgrades because
      everyone who had a computer was a geek and wanted to push the
    • not quite the last, unfortunately. and i don't have one attached externally, either.

      ah, well...

  • Why Not, good point. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by haplo21112 ( 184264 ) <haplo@epithnaFREEBSD.com minus bsd> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:06PM (#7916744) Homepage
    I honestly had not thought that far yet, but you are right. If one were to build a machine entirely built on SATA tech, there would be a problem of where do you connect the CD-ROM/R/RW, DVD/R/RW...or even IDE Zip drive for that matter.
    It is probably getting hear time for these devices to start coming equiped with SATA connections. Which rasies and interesting question what if anything keeps them from coming with both connectors so they could be used with either IDE bus type. Other than price of putting the extra connector on the drive (and perhaps if needed embeding the converter from one connection type to another)

  • New case standard needed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:07PM (#7916759)

    Damn, but I love it when you get a nice server, plug in those SCSI drives to a backplane mounted in the drive bay, and they all auto-address.

    It'd be nice if hot-swappable RAID5 IDE (complete with LED status lights) was worked out as a new standard for the home PC - one cable to the drive bay board, then plug in your drives without worrying about jumpers. It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.

    I wonder if economy of scale would make that affordable if all the next generation of PCs were sold that way?

    • It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.

      2.5" laptop hard drives suck. They're slow, and they have a way higher rate of failure than regular 3.5" hard drives.

      • Primarily, I was thinking about saving space on the case front when you want a minimum of three bays, and didn't even consider speed and reliability (I assumed equivalence to 3.5" drives)

        Having said that, the speed issue would be less significant given the increased transfer due to striping, and I think it's possible that the higher failure rates for laptop drives could be due to the fact that they're normally in laptops... poorer ventilation and frequent jostling come to mind.

        • The throughput would increase with striping, but not latency. Still, a single 7200RPM full-size drive would be faster than two striped 5400RPM 2.5" drives, and far less expensive.

          As far as reliability, yes, actually being in a laptop adds to that. But a hard drive has moving parts, and making parts larger generally means they'll wear better. In laptop drives they use smaller bearings, smaller read-heads, thinner spindle, and thinner platter. Something is going to give over time, and over significantly less
      • Actually, I recall reading that they were considering shifting to 2.5" HDDs in the BTX standard. Note: This doesn't mean laptop Hard drives. Apparently, as rotational speeds have gotten higher, the size of the physical platters has shrunk in order to increase reliability (the force at the edge of the smaller platters is less at the same rotational speed). The 3.5" size simply exists now because it's a legacy standard, but they plan to phase down to 2.5" drives since it won't be an issue, space-wise.

        As l
    • It's kind of funny that none of the responses to you point out the obvious --

      Serial ATA defines this. SATA connectors on 3.5" HDD's have a specific positional requirement similar to SCA connectors on SCSI drives. There are plenty of SATA backplanes available. Apple's XServe RAID and G5 towers use them. You can order cases with SATA backplanes for other platforms from plenty of manufacturers. There are external enclosures with SATA backplanes also.

      I guess it's also worth noting that 2.5" (laptop) IDE hard
    • Well the BTX motherboard form is coming soon, and probably mainstream acceptance will probably occur mid 2006. Course Dell will have to be pricks and screw up all the nice Mobos, so the cases can't be changed.

      And you said why dont they use laptop sized drives?

      Easy, price. A Fujitsu hardrive, 146.8GB costs $614 dollars( NewEgg [newegg.com]) A normal 160 GB (I couldnt find any 147 GB models) 5.25 SATA drive costs $147. ( NewEgg [newegg.com]) Some law (moore's?) says that HD capacity doubles every year or something like that. T

  • Cost margin (Score:4, Informative)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) * on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:14PM (#7916868) Homepage Journal
    You can now get a cdrom for 10, cdrw for 20... The cost of developing a new product in order to sell it for 5 more is just not worth it.
    • true. but it may be worth it for dvd+-rw drives, which hover around $100 on a good deal...

      once the technology and cost efficiency is there, the cd-rw manufacturers may find it cheaper to switch over, but are going to die in the wake of dvds anyhow...

  • bridge chips (Score:4, Interesting)

    by uberhund2 ( 683907 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:36PM (#7917332)
    Most of the SATA hard drives are still just parallel ATA with a bridge chip to convert them to serial. I imagine that once manufacturers switch to native SATA hardware, the reduced costs will send SATA to CDs, DVDs, etc.

  • IDE will never die... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Toxygen ( 738180 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:39PM (#7917410) Journal
    ...just ask your friendly neighbourhood floppy drive.

  • Internal Firewire? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:40PM (#7917424) Homepage Journal
    Do they make internal firewire drives?

    I've never seen one, but I do have a card that'll do it. It has 4 ports going out the back, and one that's right on the card pointed towards the inside of the case.

    • Maybe that's just unwelcome foresight on behalf of the card manufacturer. ;)
    • There is no such thing as an internal firewire drive (or what we would like to call a "native" firewire drive.) The internal port is there solely for providing a link to a front panel 1394 connector. This pisses me off to no end because 1.6Gbps firewire is due to come out shortly and provides 200MB/sec as compared to SATA's 150MB/sec, not to mention supporting up to 127 devices per channel, though that is usually limited to 63 devices per controller in current implementations - Which is still plenty for mo
      • Though the raw bandwidth of FireWire is great, it has greater latency than SATA or PATA or SCSI. It's an external standard, and has support for things like multiple devices per channel and hotplug. This ads overhead to the data transmitted. Firewire is inherently superior to USB for storage, but not to the other internal standards. SCSI and SATA2 also support ordered command queueing, which ads to performance on multi-user systems.

        Plus, with drives today, SATA's "mere" 150MB/s will never be saturated.

        • Re:Internal Firewire? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday January 08, 2004 @04:20PM (#7919488) Homepage Journal
          Like SATA, PATA, and (IIRC) unlike SCSI, 1394 can be installed as an asynchronous or synchronous bus. As such, it need have no more latency than anyone else. Programmatically it looks much like SCSI, being a register-based protocol. SCSI also has inherent support for things like multiple devices per channel and hotplug (All the mentioned standards support multiple devices per channel.) You can also do tagged queueing of firewire disks; they are typically attached via SCSI emulation. After all it's not the drive that supports ordered queueing, but the controller/host adapter.

          As for saying what with drives today SATA's 150MB/s will never be saturated, what about drives tomorrow? Why pick a standard without room for growth? Firewire is at 1.6Gbps today (though only in sampling quantities) and the 1394 WG has a plan to move to 3.2Gbps over fiber, providing 400MB/sec. As for "drives today", 800Mbps 1394 is adequate, with 100MB/sec transfer rates, since individual drives rarely provide more than 20MB/sec transfer under any conditions. However, 1.6Gbps 1394 provides more bandwidth than SATA, and allows you to connect enough drives to utilize it. What's more, it's designed for external use, so like SCSI it is irrelevant where you put your devices. It allows greater cable lengths than modern-day high-speed SCSI, however.

          It remains to be seen how the upcoming serial version of SCSI will perform, but it is safe to say that it will continue to be costly. 1394 is easy to implement, flexible, full-featured, and here today. The only thing preventing hard drive manufacturers from making 1394-native (or apparently native - some cheaper SCSI drives actually have a SCSI to IDE bridge built onto the controller board) hard drives today is the lack of demand. What I don't get is why there is a lack of demand; More and more PCs can now firewire boot, macs can firewire boot, and it would be lovely to diminish the number of goofy interfaces on the system board. Realistically, you need only USB2, IEEE1394, and an AGP slot to cover 99% of users. (Not counting the DIMM slots, CPU socket, etc, of course.) Input devices and network interfaces can go on USB2 (I would also like to see systems have onboard GigE, though), your video can go in an AGP8x slot, and storage devices can live on 1394. This would produce a truly legacy-free PC, without making it more expensive; in fact simplifying it to this degree would reduce the cost. Meanwhile, those who require legacy IO can plug something into USB.

          ATA is terrible. SATA is much better, but still has silly limitations, namely cable length (if it doesn't support external drives, it sucks) and the number of devices. SCSI is pretty decent but the cabling is complex and every piece of the system is overly expensive. Firewire can replace all three of them even if we don't have native firewire drives, but it would make much more sense if we DID have them. Cheaper, faster, cleaner, better. Legacy-free. In other words, all the things we've been asking for. Why is there such opposition to such an idea?

          • SATA has a lot of advantages... the cables can be made cheaply, the standard form-factors of drives are designed to slide in/out of a backplane (which no one has made yet) and it has room for growth. The next gen version will support 300MB/s and splitting a channel into 15 other channels. There's also talk of an external version of the standard. Plus, it's largely backward compatible with ATA.

            As for SAS (Serial attached SCSI), it has some nice features as well. First and foremost, it's backward compatible
            • It'll be very cool if the SATA on SAS plan comes to fruition. However, the cheapness of SATA cables just isn't motivation, after all 1394 cables are four conductor. The only reason they're expensive now is that not too many companies are making them.

              How is next gen SATA supposed to handle splitting a channel up like that? With some kind of hub?

              There are external versions of SATA now, but I don't know any details. Obviously they're proprietary. Until drives are meant to be external, I'm still turned off

              • Yes, you are supposed to use a type of active splitter/hub type device to split SATA into multiple channels.

                Personally, I have no need for external drives. SATA fixes clutter now inside my case, so I like it. Plus, there are affordable 10,000RPM SATA drives available, and I like that.
          • SCSI does both async and synchronous as well
      • What do you intend to fit inside one computer case that would saturate SATA?

        Any case that could hold enough drives that to push 150MB/sec already has multiple SATA controllers, doesn't it?
    • The one pointed to the inside of the case is so you can run an extension cable through to the front of the case to allow a firewire port on the front of your box. Not to allow internal firewire devices though I suppose you could use it for that. Of course, all the firewire drives out there are ATA/ATAPI with ATA to firewire bridges so why not just use your internal ATA in the first place. Firewire is for video and external expansion drives...
    • Break out your screwdriver. Rip off the plastic 'pretty parts' and mount the drive in a drive bay. You may have to make a shelf to mount the firewire-ATA conversion board in.

      Depending on the device internals, you may have to get creative for a PS as well.

  • Money, Money, Money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mhw25 ( 590290 ) on Thursday January 08, 2004 @02:43PM (#7917492)
    CD-ROMS/RWs/DVD-ROMs are commodity parts right now, with speed grades mostly maxed out around 52x. And since that speed had been reached some time ago, they have been designed around the old interface. You don't want to invest a lot of money redesigining them for a really thin margin market of uncertain longevity.

    Hard disk drives costs more, and you can sell the SATA ones at a premium, and yet most implementations used a bridging chip - there aren't that many native SATA disk drives yet.

    DVD writes may have a greater case for going to SATA - but if you are designing one you may not want to alienate the majority of people who may buy one. The market for this is so unsaturated that a buyer is as likely to be an ungrading from CD writers as one one who is buying a new system - many of which still does not feature SATA as standard - especially those DELL-type manufacturer who wants to cut every single cent possible from the cost of their components.

    Basically to do a proper SATA switch you will have to split your market, or make yourself a niche player at this moment. And unlike Hard Disks, there are far more optical drive manufacturers around a very price sensitive market.

    Most manufacturers I think will just make it as it is, and let people who really want a ribbon cable free system to use a converter.

    • Until Dell decides it wants everything to be SATA instead of ATA. They may deccide to use SATA for harddrives in thier high-end systems and then not want any ATA connections...it'll probably be a few years, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually.

  • Google, Dammit (Score:2, Informative)

    by gwynnebaer ( 319816 )
    http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2326/
  • the 1 device per channel for SATA.
    Most motherboards that have onboard SATA usually have only 2 SATA channels + the usual PATA. A lot of those onboard SATA have built in RAID controllers. Right now mainly power users are buying SATA stuff. And buying 2 and RAIDing them.
    So if they made an optical drive that used SATA, it wouldn't sell very well right now. You'll probably see them once they throw more then the usual 2 SATA channels on the board and it becomes a bit more mainstream then it is right now. Seems l
  • I thought I saw a slashdot article a while ago about a converter from PATA to SATA, i.e. a dongle you plug into your PATA device that exports an SATA interface. Perhaps I am halucinating, but, if not, this might satisfy your need.
  • I would expect to see SATA optical drives some time after I see motherboards with "native" SATA (meaning SATA which is built into the chipset, not an extra "on-board RAID" chip).

Slashdot Top Deals

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

Close