Serial ATA and Serial SCSI

aibrahim writes "In the recent Slashdot article about Serial ATA some people wanted to know where SCSI was going, and if Serial ATA could deal with some higher end workstation and low end server requirements. Apparently it has been decided that Serial ATA 2 (pdf doc) and Serial Attached SCSI are the answers."

Copy/Paste a previously published article, anyone?

[jhoffoss]

Nearly anything is better than ribbon cables. aibrahim writes "In the recent /. article about Serial ATA some people wanted to know where SCSI was going, and if Serial ATA could deal with some higher end workstation and low end server requirements. Apparently it has been decided that Serial ATA 2 (pdf doc) and Serial Attached SCSI are the answers."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/04/153224 =nested=167

Difference

[SpatchMonkey]

The main difference is that Serial ATA will be more readily available first, and will therefore become more popular.

If you look at the Serial SCSI page in the FAQ, note that it is still under development, where motherboards supporting Serial ATA are out now [slashdot.org].

Re:Copy/Paste a previously published article, anyo

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit. This one will work...
Article Here [slashdot.org]
(Oh yeah, this was posted yesterday... way to read your website, Taco.

Serial SCSI is neat.

[Sheetrock]

I've read a couple of brochures on this technology (we're looking at high-bandwidth high-availability file clusters for our hybrid AS/400-Solaris data warehousing) and it looks extremely promising.

Basically, they're extending parallel SCSI technology to address next generation I/O and direct attach storage requirements. It uses the (proven) interface from Serial ATA to avoid an unnecessarily proprietary interface and the costs that usually entails. The naming is unfortunate, because one usually thinks of parallel (side-by-side) as being faster than serial (one after the other) when the technology allows you to combine the two tactics much like in LANs. This is the technology that will enable a new generation of dense devices, such as small form factor hard drives, whereas Parallel SCSI can't because of cabling and voltage issues.

So depending on the pricing of the technology when it hits the shelves/junk mail catalogs, we're going to take a serious look at it. Does anybody have any prototype benchmarks?

Re:firewire

[bofkentucky]

Lets look at it realistically:

• 800Megabits/s = 100MegaBytes/s, so transfer rate is the same as a standard IDE disk, after the speed bump.
• What's apple charging for a firewire license these days? Will impact pricing of controllers and drives?
• You mention hot-swapability, but most ATA drives aren't in hot swap capable enclosures.
• Is it just the interface or do other things need to change to allow hot swaping (More drive components = more expensive)
• Are there RAID 1+0 controllers for firewire drives?

I heard

[Apreche]

that serial ATA, while being very fast and much better than what I've got now, will have DRM built in. Is this true? Should I not get serial ATA in my next system because of it? Anyone got any links pertaining to this issue?

Serial SCSI?

[ghopper]

Isn't that called Firewire?

SCSI vs Firewire [adaptec.com]