[wellylug] Serial ATA

[Rob Giltrap]

Chris

To find out more on serial ATA go to www.serialata.org which has a great
deal of useful information.

As for SATA II there are actually two parts.

Pt 1) Extensions
Pt 2) Increase to 300MB/s 

The extensions are predominantly for building better storage arrays for
server usage. The current capability or Raid 0,1 and JBOD for two disks
is all that a PC user pretty much needs for now. Having said that some
of the work may allow for form factor redesign in the future.

The speed increase to 300MB/s isn't really an issue as the current disk
speeds are not sufficient to really challenge the 150MB/s limit (and
probably won't be for a couple of years.

Basically what I'm saying is if you are just a PC user (or even a basic
server) then there is little point in waiting for either part of the
SATA II specification.

FYI, The coolest thing I think is coming out of SATA II is the 'Port
Multiplier' where you can have 15 disks hanging off a single SATA host
port. This is great for HSM applications, instead of archiving to tape
you just place unused files onto a SATA farm which gives slow
performance but is soooo cheap e.g. 15 disks * 200GB (@ $500/drive) =
3TB @ $7,500, which is unbelievable value.

Rob.


On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 00:01, Chris Harris wrote:
> Hi All
> 
> Is anyone using Serial ATA on Linux?
> Any tricks to setting it up?
> 
> I hear rumour SATA2 is about to be released  - is it worth waiting for?
> 
> What are your thoughts?
> 
> Regards,  Chris
-- 
Rob Giltrap <rob at ubietygroup.com>