26 May
2006
26 May
'06
11:28 p.m.
Billy Pettit wrote:
Better or not, most OEMs are driving hard to eliminate
IDE. SATA gives a
reduction in cable costs, connector costs, test fixtures, etc. This can be
a big saving on a large array. Plus less physical cable space needed, and a
small but significant power savings in drivers. Finally, it gets rid of
some of the skew problems for parallel transfers as the speed ramped up. ATA
was getting so bad that cable length was only 8 inches at the highest
transfer speed.
Yeah, but now we have "duty-cycle rated" SATA hardware. IOW, factory
seconds.
Whether USB is better/worse than Firewire - I tend to
avoid religious
arguments. And interfaces are not static anyway. The portable device
market has lead to new generations of interfaces being created. CF+ and
CF-II are widely used. And in the background being prepped for the future,
CE-ATA, a simplied ATA (only 8 commands). And it has variations using MMC
as a physical layer, and new layers including 1, 4 and 8 bit serial
interfaces. Ain't life grand?
You can't count on transfer rates provided by the USB or IEEE1394
hardware anyway, if the SATA ot IDE controller isn't up to the task.
I've got 2 USB2.0 IDE enclosures; one does well to move 4-5MB/sec. Put
the same drive in the other USB2.0 enclosure attached to the same
machine and I get better than double the throughput.
Doc