Platform said:
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SATA will *start off* as a faster channel than any existing Parallel ATA technology. SATA's speed will initially be 150 MB/s over a thin, easy-to-manage, easy-to-deal-with cable. Speeds will ramp up significantly over the medium term.
Of course, nobody is going to have ATA drives with STRs anywhere near that fast anytime soon, and PCI cards are going to be of little help on this front because most people still have 32-bit 33MHz, 133MB/s (if you're lucky -- some chipsets have bugs that cripple the speed to various limits like 75MB/s or 90MB/s) buses.
Except for Maxtor's proprietary dead-end ATA specification, parallel ATA technology is limited to 128 GB capacity, whereas SATA has huge addressing capability.
48-bit LBA addressing is at least a proposed standard, if not an approved one (I don't feel like checking
www.t13.org to see which it is). It's not proprietary. I have no idea if ATA133 is proprietary or not, however.
And that brings me to an important point that people keep missing for whatever reason: 48-bit LBA and ATA 133 are unrelated issues, no matter what anyone imagines Maxtor's marketing department is implying. While ATA 133 data transfer speeds require an ATA 133 controller, 48-bit LBA capacities only require support in your operating system's driver. To use Linux as an example since I'm familiar with it, very recent kernels (2.4.19 prereleases, or the enhanced 2.4.18 that comes with Red Hat 7.3) can access the entire 160GB capacity of a Maxtor 160GB drive on most ATA controllers (the only exceptions I'm aware of are ALI chipsets, due to hardware bugs, and some Promise controllers with old BIOSes).
The SATA command set is enhanced to provide SCSI-like capabilities. So, even at an equivalent channel speed SATA will still provide more real-world throughput because of its efficiency.
What do you mean by this? If you're talking about Tagged Command Queueing, then IBM (75GXP and later) and Western Digital (some WD1200BB's, and possibly other models) PATA drives already support this, and it's just driver support in Windows, Linux, etc. that's lacking. (BTW, there's an experimental patch that adds support to Linux for TCQ on these drives.)
And, just as important as anything mentioned, SATA controllers will not require new operating system drivers as the existing ATA drivers are fully compatible.
I think you're going to need new drivers for the "SCSI-like capabilities" you mention above, though. At a minimum, if you want TCQ or MMIO, you'll need new drivers. (IOW, the existing drivers should work but the speed increase won't be as good as if you have newer drivers -- unless your old drivers happen to support things like TCQ and MMIO on PATA too.)
Many SATA RAID host adaptors will be available once SATA hard drives finally start to be produced. There should also be 2-way SATA/PATA convertors available fairly early on, too. There will be SATA CD-ROM readers, floppy, CD-R/W, DVD-xx, tape, and Zip drives as well.
Are these SATA RAID host adaptors going to be the RAID equivalent of WinModems, like most previous ATA RAID host adaptors, or are they going to mostly be real RAID cards?
Basically speaking, SATA will both evolutionise and revolutionise common storage as we know it, and do so rather swiftly. Once people experience how good SATA technology will be, I'm sure nobody in their right mind will want to go back to crappy stuck-in-first-gear Parallel ATA technology and its cursed broad grey airflow killing cabling.
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No argument there; the SATA cables would be revolutionary [perhaps that's the wrong word, but hopefully the meaning gets across] enough even if it was otherwise unmodified PATA running on them. In fact, that's what I see as the biggest advantage of SATA. (Unless there's other stuff that I'm unaware of, especially regarding SCSI-like capabilities, the other aspects of SATA don't seem particularly important to me based on my current knowledge of them.)
I also like the suggestion of GigE switched being affordable, possible in a fibre connection. (OK I'm dreaming)
