Serial DVD burner
- Thread starter Bozo
- Start date
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
It's about time that somebody came out with a SATA optical.
ddrueding
Fixture
It's time for motherboards to ship with more than 2 SATA ports. Either a SiL3114 or a 3112a and 3112r....For years it's been easy to add 4 IDE devices, we'll need to keep that in the all-SATA world as well.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
The entrenchment of IDE seems to be much more of a barrier than it should be. Drive manufacturers are showing no sign of abandoning it and motherboards are following suit....
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
SATA's been available for over a year. I think I've put SATA in new PCs maybe 5 times. I'm waiting for the day I don't have to pay penalties in terms of cost and convienence to work with it; it just isn't compelling right now.
Oh yeah, and I hate the dinky little SATA power connector.
Oh yeah, and I hate the dinky little SATA power connector.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
ddrueding said:
The long-term plan that Intel was pushing about two years ago was that, by now, the low-end desktop mobos were supposed to have 2 SATA ports, mid-range mobos 2 or 4 SATA ports, and higher-end workstation mobos were to have 4 SATA ports.
One would have to interpolate that to mean that mid-range and higher server mobos might have at least 4 SATA ports and possibly 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 SATA ports on the mobo with a "Zero Slot" type of RAID card capability for RAID (no card for JBOD operation).
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Mercutio said:
That day was a while back. I've been getting current model SATA drives for the same price as P-ATA drives. It's been that way since at least December 2003.
The JoJo
Wannabe Storage Freak
Computer Generated Baby said:
Unfortunately this does not hold true in my part of the world, not quite yet.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
In other words, at the point in the time when SATA and PATA are at parity, it should cost you less to build a SATA computer than it would an equivalent PATA computer.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
IMHO, that power connector is complete crap. I'd guess that the designers had some idea of a single cable carrying both power and data for a drive, but that concept isn't even on the horizon.Mercutio said:
In the meantime, how many subtle faults are going to be down to unreliable power to the drive, either through age or shock/vibration? I see at least one manufacturer is retaining the molex connector as a fallback position.
For me at present, the cost premium is about 10%. Everything we've been told suggests that Seagate at least should not be charging any premium for SATA. :-?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Computer Generated Baby said:
Bullshit. I see a 15% price difference for SATA drives vs. PATA counterparts among drives I might consider buying. The Seagate SATA drives might be cheap, but who wants one of those.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
The power and data connectors on SATA just plain suck goats nads. I've already broken the data connector on one drive while trying to install a CD-ROM. Just moved theSATA cable the wrong way and 'snap'.
There is one small advantage to the sucky connectors though. I installed a StorCase removable hard drive reciever in a computer. The hard drive carrier was for SATA. To install the hard drive, just lay the hard drive in the bottom and slide it to the rear. The carrier has the female equivalent connector built in. No cables or wires. Kinda like 'plug-n-play'. This arrangement might come in handy for hot swapping hard drives if someone builds a housing for them.
Bozo :mrgrn:
There is one small advantage to the sucky connectors though. I installed a StorCase removable hard drive reciever in a computer. The hard drive carrier was for SATA. To install the hard drive, just lay the hard drive in the bottom and slide it to the rear. The carrier has the female equivalent connector built in. No cables or wires. Kinda like 'plug-n-play'. This arrangement might come in handy for hot swapping hard drives if someone builds a housing for them.
Bozo :mrgrn:
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Philips announces pricing for dual layer burner.
EU$169 (no EU symbol on my keyboard, sorry), which will be around US$200 at current rates. That seems highly reasonable to me.
EU$169 (no EU symbol on my keyboard, sorry), which will be around US$200 at current rates. That seems highly reasonable to me.
ddrueding
Fixture
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Mercutio said:
Definitely no bull! Yes, I've been buying (at work) Seagate SATA (no PATA, though), and without a doubt they really have been available at the s-a-m-e price since around December of last year.
The same goes for Maxtor MaxLine SATA 250 GB hard drives, SATA pricing has been the same as PATA for a few months, and has actually been l-o-w-e-r than PATA pricing for the past few weeks. Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and MaxLine hard drives are the only ATA-type technology hard drives I've been buying (work) because of their particular operating characteristics or capabilities.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
time said:
In the "old school" (conventional) way of PC component assembly, it's too fragile.
So, what would the "new school" way be? A hard drive that slips into a very basic and minimal sort of drive bay, where the power and data cables stay connected to the various bays and you only deal with the raw drive (CD/DVD, hard drive).
The designers had hot-plugging in mind -- more like what you see with SCA or F-C. I don't think there was ever a loose single cable plan for SATA (or SAS). I had hoped for "optical" SATA. One would have thought that with optical connector and transceiver production, at levels of what it is in these days and times, that the pricing would be close enough to make the transition from copper to fibre-optic for high speed serial data.
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
That Philips drive looks sweet. Hopefully they will improve on the curren 2.4x burn speeds on the DL discs.
I notice it consumes 25W? Isn't that high for a burner?
I notice it consumes 25W? Isn't that high for a burner?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The first Yamaha CD burner (i.e. the actual FIRST commercially available burner) used 28W, so I don' think it's that far out of line.
Gary, I believe I've made my position on Seagate ATA drives clear - they shouldn't bother. MaxLine drives are a different matter, but if Seagate went SCSI only it wouldn't affect my life in the slightest.
Gary, I believe I've made my position on Seagate ATA drives clear - they shouldn't bother. MaxLine drives are a different matter, but if Seagate went SCSI only it wouldn't affect my life in the slightest.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Mercutio said:
I wasn't aware of your prior Seagate position. All I recall was something recently about Western Digi.
In these modern times, my main use for Seagate ATA / SATA drives is for q~u~i~e~t operations. If I was strictly into economy storage, then I'd use Samsung ATA drives. Otherwise, I'd likely be using SCSI.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Seagate drives are aggravating because of the combination of properties that tend to make up their ATA products:
o They aren't economy storage - usually Maxtor or WD has a cheaper drive at a given price point. Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but Samsung drives are explicitly not economy storage drives now. There are a lot less Samsung drives in the lower rungs of price when you look at Pricewatch these days.
o Seagate "performance" is lousy, and has been for a long, long time. I know it's not the primary concern for Seagate but the last time a Seagate ATA drive had a high position on SR's performance leaderboard was 2000, with the Barracuda ATA III (surpassed 2 weeks later by the Maxtor DM40+). Doesn't it bother you a little that the biggest drive manufacturer can't make a fast ATA drive?
o Seagate is quiet: OK. That's great. But Samsung drives are nearly as quiet, tend to cost less, and the other manufacturers (the ones that aren't WD, anyway) seem to be taking heed. I'm surprised how quiet 7k250s are, for example.
o Seagate is more-or-less bringing up the rear in terms of capacity and CERTAINLY has the worst warranty among the drive vendors (iirc, there's only ONE seagate drive with a 3-year warranty).
I guess my anti-Seagate stance mostly comes from the fact that they're the 800lb. gorilla of the industry and there's so bloody little they actually do right.
o They aren't economy storage - usually Maxtor or WD has a cheaper drive at a given price point. Also, I don't know if you've noticed, but Samsung drives are explicitly not economy storage drives now. There are a lot less Samsung drives in the lower rungs of price when you look at Pricewatch these days.
o Seagate "performance" is lousy, and has been for a long, long time. I know it's not the primary concern for Seagate but the last time a Seagate ATA drive had a high position on SR's performance leaderboard was 2000, with the Barracuda ATA III (surpassed 2 weeks later by the Maxtor DM40+). Doesn't it bother you a little that the biggest drive manufacturer can't make a fast ATA drive?
o Seagate is quiet: OK. That's great. But Samsung drives are nearly as quiet, tend to cost less, and the other manufacturers (the ones that aren't WD, anyway) seem to be taking heed. I'm surprised how quiet 7k250s are, for example.
o Seagate is more-or-less bringing up the rear in terms of capacity and CERTAINLY has the worst warranty among the drive vendors (iirc, there's only ONE seagate drive with a 3-year warranty).
I guess my anti-Seagate stance mostly comes from the fact that they're the 800lb. gorilla of the industry and there's so bloody little they actually do right.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
I agree. Seagate isn't even making the strong showing that it once had in the noise department. And it doesn't have anything else.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Mercutio said:
sechs said:
I've long been under the impression that Seagate's firmware in their ATA/SATA (and as far as that goes, SCSI) Barr IV, V, and 7200.7 series hard drives have all been designed to run conservatively -- no wild seeks, instead orderly conservative performance; thus the quiet but overall lackluster performance.
Mercutio said:
The third most quiet drive I've personally experienced was not the one and only Samsung 7200 RPM ATA drive I've handled, but an 120 GB IBM (not Hitachi) 180GXP. The second would have to be a close tie between Seagate Barr V and 7200.7 drives, with q~u~i~e~t~e~s~t being the Seagate Barr 5400.1 drive (40 GB). The 5400.1 is so quiet that you have to be standing right over it in a totally quiet room just to hear it start up. It's spooky quiet!
As for the Hitachi 7K250 series, I've heard it's pretty quiet, but supposedly 2 times an hour it goes into some sort of maintenance mode that sounds like two park pigeons having sex -- or something like that.
Pradeep
Storage? I am Storage!
Computer Generated Baby said:As for the Hitachi 7K250 series, I've heard it's pretty quiet, but supposedly 2 times an hour it goes into some sort of maintenance mode that sounds like two park pigeons having sex -- or something like that.
LOL, yeah it is certainly a wierd noise. When I first installed one and heard the noise, I thought one of the kids was having a nightmare in the other room. Took me a while to track it down.
Stereodude
Not really a
Yeah, look at how quickly the parallel port, floppy drive, and serial ports all disapppeared once there was a better interface around.sechs said:
The JoJo
Wannabe Storage Freak
Stereodude said:
LOL, good one
ddrueding
Fixture
Stereodude said:
A good point, my K8 motherboard (MSI K8T Neo - awesome board) still has 2x PS/2, 1x Serial, and 1x Parallel. I can understand about the floppy, as it's required to load the 3rd party storage controller driver (I've ranted about this in the past). But at least they have 4x USB on the back and another 4x USB on headers....that's a nice start.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
Stereodude said:
Are you expecting serial ATA floppies and USB 2.0 external analog modems?
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Stereodude said:
Huh? Only on notebooks, and not even there on the better brands. (Except floppy drives: all brands of notebook have abandoned the floppy drive, and appropriately so in my view. In a desktop a floppy drive costs essentially nothing, causes no problems, and remains a very valuable tool - which is seldom used but a lifesaver when you do need it. In a notebook, where space is ridiculously valuable and parts ridiculously expensive, it is worth putting up with the inconvenience of not having a floppy drive. Serial, PS/2 and parallel ports are a different mater: they take no room to speak of and are more important in a notebook as it has limited expansion and connectivity options even at the best of times.)
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
sechs said:
...or Firewire keyboards and mouses.
Actually, if you can still find a new LS-120 floppy drive in your locale, they are well worth getting if you believe that you may have a need for reading floppy discs well into the future.
Once the antiquated floppy port is gone from mobos, then you may be in a world of hurt trying to read discs with conventional floppy drive units, unless someone comes out within a PCI / PCI Express add-in card with the standard parallel floppy drive interface.
With the LS-120, the interface is IDE (ATAPI), which means that it can be installed inside a USB or Firewire external housing for interfacing to any USB or Firewire equipped computer system. So, there's a good use for the LS-120. Yes, they can read and write to 120 MB Superdisk floppy media, but they can also read and write to conventional floppy disc media at a higher rate than conventional floppy drives can -- especially with reading, which seems like 4 to 8 times as fast. I currently have both an LS-120 and a DVD-ROM in separate external USB enclosures. They work just dandy.
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
That is a very wise suggestion, Computer Generated Baby. I'd better do just that before I don't have the choice. What a shame that in this part of the world the accursed zip drive was much, much more common. I see old lying-around-and-useless zip drives quite often. An LS-120, I'll probably have to pay actual money for one of those.
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Tea said:
The USB "Pen Drive" (you know, the little flash memory thingees) have *finally* been the answer to gettting rid of the floppy drive. The Zip Drive 100 was not, in my opinion, even though people back on the *old* Storage Review forums used to try to persuade me otherwise.
The only real problem with USB Pen Drive versus floppy drive is that I can still give away a floppy disc and not be financially impacted. Even a cheap USB Pen Drive is far too expensive to just give away to some stranger.
However, as I have occasionally forecasted here, there will be a new player on the block that will displace the flash-memory-based USB Pen Drive as we know it today, a new medium that you can plug into a port in a similar fashion like a Pen Drive, but be affordabe enough to just give to someone. This will be Plastic Memory.
Stereodude
Not really a
You missed my sarcasm my dear monkey.Tea said:
Fushigi
Storage Is My Life
Stereodude
Not really a
Some new motherboards can even boot from a Pen Drive! :aok:Computer Generated Baby said:
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Fushigi said:
Now that's what I'd call "thinking outside the pen!"
But, there's enough space even in a mini-mose like that one to have at least 512 MB. I've got a few PenDrives, and 32 MB is about as small as I'd want. For just Word and Excel documents, 32 MB is plenty, though.
Marketing could've called it something like SmartMouse or The SmartAss Mouse.
- My Mouse Is Smarter Than Yours
Computer Generated Baby
Learning Storage Performance
Stereodude said:
Yes, I've heard that capability was coming (or at last here!).
The second wave is to not only be bootable on a wide variety of "modern" X86 computers, but (allegedly) also to be able to launch applications from a non-erasable region of flash memory. (Non-erasable, as in you check or uncheck a box to allow erasure.)
I believe this would be a specific version of... er... MS Office for Mobile Devices (or something similar in name) that will be tweaked to work properly with Pen Drive installations and other similar flash-memory-based thingamajigs. If it does happen, I'd even expect these tweaked applications -- MS Mobile Office, IBM Mobile SmartSuite, WordPerfect Mobile Office, etc -- to be pre-installed on 1 GB PenDrives. In the case of MS, probably *subsidised* PenDrives. The O/S would be some version of Windows of course, like Windoze CE Jumbo.