Serial ATA: Promise vs. Highpoint

[Ian]

PC Hardware have tested four SATA products from HighPoint Technologies and Promise Technology. In the next years Serial ATA will replace Ultra ATA, but it’s not easy to predict when SATA will dominate the desktop storage market. The editor describes the SATA standard and tests the solutions in a real life environment. In order to test the interface performance PC Hardware got two different versions of Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120Gb 8Mb HDDs (SATA and UATA):

In the past years it became obvious that the serial communication can be done in a more flexible and reliable way than the parallel communication. It’s technologically feasible to design high speed serial controllers because the serial communication is less susceptible to external noise and synchronization problems. As you know, the length of the parallel ATA cables is limited because it was impossible to maintain a reliable communication with higher length cables. The parallel data cables need a lot of wires and therefore they create a lot of routing problems.

Read the article here

 

[Eric Portelance]

My opinion on SerialATA is that it's a great idea on paper, but in practice the results leave to be desired. Current hard drive technologies don't even require ATA100 (unless of course you're using RAID), and that's the only advantage of SerialATA, added bandwidth if you're using RAID, but even there, I question the need for that much bandwidth. However, maybe this will force manufacturers to try and keep up with the specs. The other cool thing, though, is the size of the cable. Not only can it be longer than UltraATA cables, but also it's much more compact, eliminating those big, ugly, grey cables from our boxes and promoting better airflow.

 

[Quadophile]

Besides the advantage of better airflow, SATA also is easy to install - no jumper settings need to be done, that is, no worries which one is master and which a slave.

 

[muckshifter]

I have my Asus A7N8X Delux waiting for installation

... and SATA will support 'hot swap', swap a HD out while the computer is running.

 

[Eric Portelance]

Re: I have my Asus A7N8X Delux waiting for installation

Originally posted by muckshifter
... and SATA will support 'hot swap', swap a HD out while the computer is running.

Not as easy as it sounds, though. Your hard drive has to be unmounted first and setup in Windows for hotswapping. You can't just go and yank it out. Besides, I don't think the average PC user will want to do that anyway.