Serial ATA 1.0 specs afgerond

The Register meldt dat het 'Serial ATA working group' (waar o.a. Maxtor, IBM, Seagate, Quantum, Dell en Intel deel van uitmaken) klaar is met versie 1.0 van Serial ATA. Zoals je eerder kon lezen zijn we met deze techniek eindelijk verlost van de lompe IDE kabels die nogal airflow blokkerend werken. Daarnaast profiteren we van een stukje extra snelheid en betrouwbaarheid. Erg handig is verder het gegeven dat bestaande besturingssystemen al compatible zijn met de techniek:

One of the promises of Serial ATA is that it presents the same view to the OS as a parallel ATA drive, and doesn't require special device drivers.

Intel's Jeff Ravencraft, Serial ATA committee chair, told us that any additional effort to tweak the parallel ATA interface beyond the current ATA-100 spec wouldn't be worth the trouble.

"We're not sure if it's doable, and even it was, it would be a very fragile innovation," he said. APT's business development manager Robert Streeby added that there would be reliability benefits for other PC components - particularly CPUs - once the requirement to support 5V I/O was removed.

But the most obvious benefit is that PCs should finally get smaller - or at least in theory. "There's 72 square inches of cabling inside a PC. A thin replacement makes way for better ventilation, and smaller cases."

The first private draft spec is intended to reach 1.5Gbps throughput speeds, although real transfer rates will max at 150Mbps. Further revisions are pegged to raise this to 300 and 600Mbps. [break] De eerste Serial ATA producten worden eind volgend jaar op de markt verwacht. Aangezien er softwarematig dus niet gesleuteld hoeft te worden is het nu aan de hardwarefabrikanten om Serial ATA te gaan ondersteunen:[/break]The first spec will support a simple 1 to 1 connections, sources tell us, with one drive to one interface. It's hoped the 1.0 draft will be ratified and made public by the end of the year. Streeby sees devices coming on stream towards the end of next year, which is rather more aggressive a schedule than other will admit to. But with no modifications needed to the software stack, it's down to motherboard support, so it could conceivably squeak in.

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