Why SATA?

[progbuddy]

I thought SATA was a good idea, until Firewire. Firewire is more than twice as fast as SATA, with transfer rates of 700 MB/sec (compared to 300 MB/sec SATA). It has fewer contacts too, making it a nice, clean operation to perform :p. I think it would be neat to have internal firewire and firewire HDDs.

[Mitternacht]

You must be mistaken. SATA can have transfer rates of 3.0 Gb/sec. SATA is just over 4x faster than firewire according to your specs of firewire.

[progbuddy]

You must be mistaken. SATA can have transfer rates of 3.0 Gb/sec. SATA is just over 4x faster than firewire according to your specs of firewire.

Then why are harddrives still slow (300 MB/sec) for SATA? Only a few I have seen with higher than 300 MB/sec, and those are the 15k RPM drives.

Hmm, so would a faster drive head be more effective? Ugh, ratios, fractions, and formulas.

[LiTHiUM0XiD3]

not rly quite simple http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18409&vpn=ST3320620AS&manufacture=Seagate
look there.... 320Gb sata 3GB for bout $130 canadian
fast
and cheap.....
would woup firewire in ways u couldnt imagine
thats why sata.....

[OvRiDe]

Wikipedia to the rescue...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

About halfway down the page there is a chart comparing SATA to the other buses.

Firewire 800 = 786 Mbits/sec
SATA 300 (3Gb/s) = 2400 Mbits/sec.

Even ATA133 is significantly faster then Firewire at 1064 Mbits/sec.

Hope that article helps..

[Ronyx]

not rly quite simple http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18409&vpn=ST3320620AS&manufacture=Seagate
look there.... 320Gb sata 3GB for bout $130 canadian
fast
and cheap.....
would woup firewire in ways u couldnt imagine
thats why sata.....

you said it bro, i actually went for this HDD except the stupid tech guys installed a Western Digital instead of a Seagate... Same HDD but i trust Seagate more... i dunno why. Plus the Western Digital drive has a "safely remove hardware" thing that you do with USB and iPods and ****. I just don't get it... What is it gonna do if i eject it... fly out the back of my case shredding anything in it's path? lolz. Why would u put that feature in anyway, who would want to remove their HDD, safely or not who would? Or is it just all SATA drives?

[luciusad2004]

you said it bro, i actually went for this HDD except the stupid tech guys installed a Western Digital instead of a Seagate... Same HDD but i trust Seagate more... i dunno why. Plus the Western Digital drive has a "safely remove hardware" thing that you do with USB and iPods and ****. I just don't get it... What is it gonna do if i eject it... fly out the back of my case shredding anything in it's path? lolz. Why would u put that feature in anyway, who would want to remove their HDD, safely or not who would? Or is it just all SATA drives?

It could have something to do with he fact that SATA is hot swappable (I think that is what it is called). What i mean is that, im pretty sure you can remove an SATA hard drive while the pc is running. Obviously you wouldn't want to yank your boot disk, but if you had a seperate disk in one of those hard drive bays that you put in the 5.25' bays usually used for cd'roms and the such, you would have easy access to your hard disks. That way you could have disks with all of your files on it and take it around with you i guess.

You can also get external SATA and you would have to ability the disconnect that at any moment.

[luciusad2004]

I havent really had any use with SATA either. I was just reading up on it on Wikipedia when i saw that it was hot-swappable. It stuck with me because i thought it was a pretty cool feature.

The only firewire device i have is my old school ipod lol. wouldn't mind getting a newer one but the one i have works fine so im useing that till i get some spare money.

[Ronyx]

when you said hot swappable i immediately thought of Xbox hard drives. I remember reading up on some guy modding his Xbox and he hot swapped his HDD so that something wouldn't go wrong. He had to do it quickly too.

[luciusad2004]

Idk but i do know that the xbox 360 hard drive is SATA based so i guess its probably possible to detach it while the 360 is powered on, it wouldn't be a good idea to do it while it was being accessed though.

[DaveW]

EDIT: _LMAO!_ Who changed my sig?? Who put the watercase thing in there?! LOLOL fckn dave

??? I haven't touched anyone's sig.

-Dave

[Airbozo]

Let me see if I can snap a pic of a "hot swappable" backplane to show what the workstations use...

[luciusad2004]

Hot plugging is apparently dependent on the SATA power connection. It says in wikipedia that i you were to get a SATA drive that is powered by a standard molex connection the drive will not be capable of hot-swapping. The SATA power connector has a 3.3V line which the molex lacks and i guess the 3.3V is necessary for hot-plugging

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA

[LiTHiUM0XiD3]

ok the case with the xbox HD was from the old IDE one..... u hot swap it while the xbox box is running to bypass the HD lock.... so u can acess the files on ur computer..... its quick.. its dirty.... and dangerous to ur hardware... but it works....take it from a xbox modder.... and yes the sata drives can be "ejectable" or hotswapable and yes they need a proper PSU to do so....

[CanaBalistic]

I was under the assumtion that you'd have to get a special sata drive for hot-swaping.

A lot of new mobo's have hot-swap sata plugs on the I/O panel and as far as i know, they have power running to the plug so you dont need a molex or external power supply. They simply get thier power from the plug.

And for the life of me, i cant see why an internal sata plug would be hot-swapable. Most if not all people are not going to unscrew the side of there case to hot-swap a drive.

[luciusad2004]

And for the life of me, i cant see why an internal sata plug would be hot-swapable. Most if not all people are not going to unscrew the side of there case to hot-swap a drive.

But they could use one of those 5.25 hard drive bays that makes the drive easy to access. I assume they run to the motherboard in the same manner as a normal setup would. Another situation might be if your running a home server, or any server for that matter, that way you could swap out hard drives on the fly without any down time. Its not really that every one is going to be using the feature its just useful to have for those situations when it might be necessary or at the very least convenient.

[Omega]

...I'm running a SATA drive on a Molex and I can (and have) hot-swapped it.

It's pretty nifty.


For those who don't know, also, SCSI (Small Component Systems Interface) is also hot-swappable.

[luciusad2004]

For those who don't know, also, SCSI (Small Component Systems Interface) is also hot-swappable.

Yeah i heard about SCSI. I dont remember why its not common though. I think i read that its supposed to be pretty expensive, and noisy.

I don't usually find any mother boards that have on-board SCSI controllers either. Don't you usually have to get like a PCI card to use it?

You know this thread went a lot further than i thought it would. I like talking about hard drives for some reason... My gf said she came in to my room one morning and i was talking about hard drives in my sleep.

[Airbozo]

Scsi drives are usually more expensive than sata drives with lower capacity. The spindle speed and transfer rate are higher on most drives (320MB/sec for the ultra 320 drives). The cable specification has become more stringent as the technology increases. In the latest scsi specification you can connect 16 devices (including the controller) to the scsi bus with no data transfer degradation. Notice I said "devices", as scsi devices can be almost _anything_, including scanners, printers, tape drives, tape jukeboxes (the jukebox robot is one scsi device), etc... The newer scsi drives get their power from the scsi bus so there is only one connector. Due to the spindle speed, most scsi drives are noisier than sata drives, but since sata drives are now starting to ship with the faster spindle speeds, the sata drives are also becoming more noisy.