Marvell SATAII
- Thread starter Buck
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Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
3000Mpbs = 375MB/s. Exactly how many drives can I attach to one of these? That will be really spiffy if each chip supports say, 8 drives.
No?
How about a new size limit? Still 48-bit?
So what's the point?
No?
How about a new size limit? Still 48-bit?
So what's the point?
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Mercutio said:
Fast data transfer?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Is that like how ATA133 is faster than ATA100? You'd have to have a pretty special combination of drives to saturate SATA/150. And a better-than-PCI data bus, too.
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Looks like the SATA-2 will enable extra features. Hopefully SATA-2 will remain in action for a fair while, there has been so many iterations of ATA the mind wobbles. A couple of nice cheap 300+GB SATA-2 drives should go nicely with a couple of SA-SCSI 15K drives on a SA-SCSI controller. Perhaps on a PCI-Express bus.
Dïscfärm
Learning Storage Performance
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) controllers will definitely be fully compatible with SATA-2 devices, though I'm still not 100% certain about *all* SATA-1 devices. Chances are SAS will work just fine and dandy with any SATA device, but only up to a point. I believe hot-swapping is handled a bit differently with SATA-1.
SATA-2 is essentially a subset of SAS.
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
i'm hoping i can skip S-ATA1 altogether...
Looking into the cloudy crystal ball, it looks as if SATA-2 for the "volume desktop" will be arriving in 2005 -- which is just about the time when the SATA-3 / SAS-2 committee will convene.
A nice SAS controller plugged into a fast PCI-X slot (64-bit / 133 MHz) might just turn out to be the way to go for hard drives, with the onboard SATA-1 channels being used for SATA CD-R/W (or DVD-R/W) and other storage devices.
Pradeep said:
Well, don't hold your breath. It seems that "Grantsdale" is officially coming in mid-2004 -- at the earliest.
The Grantsdale chipset will introduce PCI Express. After that, there will soon be more chipsets (from Intel and then Serverworks) that also have PCI Express support.
So, whether we like it or not, it seems Intel will foist PCI Express (previously called 3GIO) upon us even though PCI-X will be at its evolutionary half-way point.
In addition to being a serial bus (like everything else -- it seems), PCI Express will also eliminate AGP.
Also, I don't know what AMD's take is on PCI Express. They may very well line up AGAINST it, instead promoting further PCI-X speeds.
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
If AMD don't take up PCI-Express then things are going to get messy on the graphics card front. Two different models of all cards, one AGP, one PCI-Express. I hope AMD have enough market share to do that. Of course 2004 is a long way away in computer time 
Onomatopoeic
Learning Storage Performance
Pradeep said:
Opteron will have PCI Express as it turns out. Via is supposedly preparing a PCI Express chipset for early 2004 that will have both PCI Express and "old" 32-bit / 33 MHz PCI -- along with USB2, Gb Ethernet, SATA1, and SATA RAID.
I still have no clarification on exactly how many PCI Express slots ANY of these upcoming mobos (AMD, Intel processors) will have. If they only put in one stinking PCI Express slot, what the hell good is that other than replacing AGP with "AGP On Steroids?" I'd love to have an Ultra 320 SCSI or SAS controller plugged into a PCI Express slot, along with my graphics adaptor.
By the way Pradeep, one more thing that I *criminally* did not mention above about PCI Express -- something that'll make performance freaks salivate yet some more -- is that each PCI Express slot has dedicated bandwidth. So, it doesn't matter that the PCI Express graphics card next to your PCI Express SCSI controller is toiling away operating the jaws of Packman (or whatever), because PCI Express architecture completely leaves the old shared bus concept behind. The PCI Express circuitry uses crossbar-switching technology to service expansion bus I/O, so the only constraint is the processor local bus throughput.
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
Onomatopoeic said:
I can see one benefit of a single PCI express slot right now... Most server boards right now come without an AGP slot.. and all the "home" and even workstation class boards basically require an AGP slot.
If you replaced the AGP with a single PCI Express slot you'd have a lot more flexibility, giving the board quite a bit more potential to be used as either a great server board or a great workstation board or even a great gamer board...
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Onomatopoeic, isn't PCI-Express nothing but Intel's Infiniband? The so-called "fabric" architecture? IIRC mainframe storage I/O is also of this type.
From what little I've read, PCI-Express is one heck of a technology. The two main drawbacks to it would be cost (initially, till volume picks up) and the fact that it's not backward compatible with PCI, PCI-X, et al. Though that isn't going to stop some newbie 5 years from now applying grease to a PCI card and trying to shove it into a PCI-Express slot. Dell and Intel are the two major backers here, with the rest (including ServerWorks) lining up with PCI-X.
PCI-X and it's variants, on the other hand, are backward compatible and cost a whole lot less to implement because they are evolutionary changes to a standard architecture. The drawback, of course, is that newer technologies (like 10G) are predicted to outstrip the capabilities of PCI-X etc. pretty quickly.
Interesting times ahead.
From what little I've read, PCI-Express is one heck of a technology. The two main drawbacks to it would be cost (initially, till volume picks up) and the fact that it's not backward compatible with PCI, PCI-X, et al. Though that isn't going to stop some newbie 5 years from now applying grease to a PCI card and trying to shove it into a PCI-Express slot. Dell and Intel are the two major backers here, with the rest (including ServerWorks) lining up with PCI-X.
PCI-X and it's variants, on the other hand, are backward compatible and cost a whole lot less to implement because they are evolutionary changes to a standard architecture. The drawback, of course, is that newer technologies (like 10G) are predicted to outstrip the capabilities of PCI-X etc. pretty quickly.
Interesting times ahead.
Onomatopoeic
Learning Storage Performance
mubs said:
PCI Express and Infiniband are two different things altogether. Infiniband is essentially competition for HyperTransport. Also, Infiniband is NOT an Intel technology, though Intel is still part of the Infiniband committee. Intel *was* pushing Infiniband for a bit there, but as of about 1.5 years ago, Intel decided to invest a LOT more of its marketing and research efforts into the 3GIO peripheral bus, which is now called PCI Express.
Infiniband is not a peripheral bus. To place Infiniband in its rightful spot in the overall picture of things that handle dataflow, Infiniband would be The God Of All Local Data Pipes. PCI, PCI-X, PCI-Express, AGP, USB, Firewire, SCSI, SATA, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, can and will dovetail directly into an Infiniband pipe. You can also build Fabrics with Infiniband. Of course, you'll need an Infiniband Fabric Switch around for such.
Infiniband has a very high level of "intelligence" (read: co-processing) in its inner workings. Infiniband is -- like PCI Express -- serial in nature. Just some of Infiniband's appealing characteristics are *very* low CPU overhead, scalability, and extendibility. In theory, it may eventually come to pass that hard drives, and other storage devices, will be available with native Infiniband support. Since Intel has de-emphasised Infiniband in favour of PCI Express, the Infiniband push has slowed significantly. But, Infiniband is not dead. There are a few companies that are in the process of bringing Infiniband integrated circuits and peripherals to market.
http://www.infinibandta.org/home
Yes, for the most part. It IS fast as hell, but a lot of industry people don't think we need it yet. But, Intel doesn't think that at all and is now marching ahead at double pace with rolling out PCI Express from lowly desktop to awe-inspiring server.
As with any new technology, the initial price will be a tad high in the beginning until economies of scale kick in. Actually, just like SATA, PCI Express will actually be slightly LESS expensive to produce than (parallel) PCI, since the overall product is less complex from a materials standpoint -- meaning very low chip count on the PCB surface and the connector pin count is significantly smaller.
They would have to be extremely delusional since the sockets won't even be similar.
Er... you're talking "old" news as far as Serverworks goes, mainly because the main dude at BroadCom ended up pushing the other dude that founded Serverworks out the door over this issue. Serverworks is now behind others in bringing out PCI Express, but WILL bring PCI Express out for at least Intel microprocessors and -- since they've recently admitted to have begun developing for AMD -- likely AMD x64 processors. Still, 2, 3, or 4 years from now, Serverworks will probably be King Of PCI-X Support, producing chipsets with PCI-X running at 266 MHz and 533 MHz.
10GbE will run fine on a 266 MHz PCI-X bus. But, add a "busy" SCSI controller to that same PCI-X/266 bus and the performance of your 10GbE network card will begin to suffer. On a PCI-X/533 bus, the problem would in theory be eliminated only because you just doubled the theoretical bandwidth of the PCI expansion bus.
As I was alluding to in my previous message to Pradeep, PCI Express is NOT a shared bus architecture. So, herein lies a real advantage with PCI Express over all parallel PCI technologies.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Thanks for setting me straight, n/9. That was certainly illuminating!