Serial ATA - Worth it?

[Demosthenes]

Some reviews criticized the nForce2 for not supporting Serial ATA.

I think it would be a rather silly idea at the time, taking into account that most boards that support it offer adapters from serial to ATA anyway. Compounded with the fact that while theoretical speeds can far outstrip parallel ATA, the realized speeds insofar are comparable to parallel, it seems rather uneconomical at the time. My only thanks to serial ATA is no more whining about those ribbons making a mess inside the case. But, so far, Serial ATA is not one of my concerns when upgrading.

That said, who has or is getting it in their next build?

[catch23]

It's not worth it yet, because you'll lose performance by using an adapter on the hard drive...once Serial ATA hard drives start coming out I'll use it.

[HAL9000]

No rush here either. I might consider it when buying a new hard drive sometime... get the drive and a serial ATA card... then when I do a board upgrade get a board with built in support.

[piasabird]

At a couple of technology expos like Intels people have noted when you move the cable to the serial ata drive the computer reboots. Serial ATA may still have a few kinks to work out. I have not seen any information on vendors selling Serial ATA Hard Drives yet????? Why should you volunteer to be a Serial ATA Beta Tester? The only advantage is really thin cable.

Inside a hard drive there is a UART device that converts parallel to serial already, so I dont think that will slow it down much. Howerver you would be going from paralless to serial at one end then from serial to parallel at the other end and from parallel back to serial inside the harddrive. What a Hassle. Still 1.5 Mbps it is probably still faster than ATA133 even with the adapters. I saw somewhere where one of the RAID card manufacturers had tested it already on normal hard dirves.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Originally posted by Demosthenes That said, who has or is getting it in their next build?

I am. Always live for the future.

[Demosthenes]

I think price will be a concern for a while as with most things. Fab plants have to be retooled, new marketing schemes, new boards, and so on. Still, it has been a while since there has been such a profound "taking up of arms" in the computer industry to eliminate one of the most fundamental (i.e. old) I/O buses on the market. That is to say it took "them" a while to get rid of ISA cards. On that note, I sympathize with Sir Krusader.

Respectfully,

Demosthenes

[Tuf]

Unless there is a compelling reason not too I will likely give it a shot when it becomes available. I look forward to the added speed it promises.

[glc]

Demosthenes: I still maintain that the best internal dialup modem you can have is an ISA hardware modem with jumpers, even the ISA bus is faster than any modem. I'm not so quick on wishing the legacy stuff to go away, both my ISA slots are occupied. Have you ever looked in System Devices in device manager on a board with no ISA slots? It detects a PCI-to-ISA bridge so it's still there in the chipset.

[Demosthenes]

Well, yes, but that as I see it is the difference between a bad bus and good hardware and a "good" bus with bad hardware. Most PCI modem manufacturers just cut corners.

It is the fact that people still hold on to the old standards which prevents progress. I am not saying that old is bad, far from it, since I tend to like myself. And, perhaps it is the cheap money saving hacks the manufacturers perform which make people adhere to the old standard. But, it is the fact that any progress made in the computer industry, any new inovation, no matter how good, is always faced with a strong opposition and comparison to the "olden" ways. If I had it my way, I would rid the ISA, PCI, IDE, P/S2, etc buses as all are old and outdated.

Take Microsoft for example. Oh, I do not like XP, activation is bad, it looks all bubbly and gay, I like (insert MS product here) better. But, these sentiments are transformed, though, through time and XP is adopted for its merits. It happens with every mainstream MS Operating System.

Enough rambling. I guess my point is, Serial ATA will meet resistance, as is expected, but will eventually be adopted for its merits. Nothing earth-shattering, but it follows the pattern.

Respectfully,

Demosthenes

[piasabird]

Memory configurations in computers are still based on the old DOS memory configuration........