LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Serial: Serial Ata
built 621 days ago
Serial ATA is a standard that has been in development for some time now and it's a relief to finally see it being integrated into both storage devices and motherboards. Now that it has finally come to market, it is likely that new systems will quickly adopt the new standard. This will be particularly true since the overall cost of building Serial ATA controllers and devices should be less than the equivalent parallel ATA devices. Many motherboard manufacturers are already starting to include both Serial ATA and ATA/100 controllers on the same motherboard. Intel and several other chipset manufacturers are ... looking to integrate Serial ATA controllers into their chipsets. If the products can get to market quickly and in sufficient supply, it should be a quick transition.
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The core of Serial ATA is defined by the Serial ATA 1.0 Specification, which was published in August 2001. You can obtain a copy of this specification at http://www.serialata.org/ . To make adoption easier for the new interconnect, the Serial ATA 1.0 Specification defines a special mode for Serial ATA controllers so that they emulate the behavior and configuration of the parallel ATA interconnect. In this Emulating Parallel ATA mode, Serial ATA controllers can leverage all the existing parallel ATA drivers and infrastructure of shipped Windows operating systems.
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Serial ATA does have other developed and intended design advantages built into the interface as well. Older ATA/IDE devices were developed around the concept of a master/slave relationship that allows for 2 devices to reside on the same controller. In order to do this, the two devices had to be set in a master and slave relationship to allow the controller to know which device could potentially be used as a boot device. In addition, the two devices when running simultaneously would have to contend for the bandwidth along the data path. This effectively halved the maximum transfer rates for each device when running two devices simultaneously (which is ... the reason to put hard drives and optical drives on separate ATA contollers or cables). Serial ATA removes this by giving each device on a controller a full dedicated point-to-point connector with 150 MB/s bandwidth that does not have to be shared.
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The terminology around Native Serial ATA mode and PCI Native mode has caused confusion in the past. It is possible to have an Emulating Parallel ATA mode controller operate in PCI Native mode. Additionally, PCI Native mode doesn't imply Native Serial ATA mode support. For more information on PCI Native mode for ATA controllers go to http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/Native-modeATA.mspx.
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The developers of Serial ATA did not forget about future bandwidth either. The current roadmap for Serial ATA technology has planned for a second generation of the technology to run at a 300 MB/s transfer rate in 2-3 years and eventually 600 MB/s. This is very surprising considering that current drive technology can barely support burst transfer rates of even 100 MB/s. The other problem is that the current PCI bus standard used to interconnect Serial ATA controllers onto a motherboard or via an expansion card is restricted to 133 MB/s which is lower than the initial standard. Until the new PCI-X interface is adopted or Serial ATA controllers are integrated into the chipsets for the motherboard, there is no reason to update the standard to a higher speed.
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Founded in 1997, 3ware, Inc., the technology leader in high-performance, high-capacity Serial ATA (SATA) RAID storage solutions, delivers reliable, enterprise class RAID storage using -- cost effective SATA drives. 3ware's StorSwitch(TM) architecture applies network packet switching to storage controllers, eliminating the bottleneck found in traditional storage architectures. 3ware solutions are designed to meet the explosive demand for cost-effective, scalable storage, driven by high-capacity enterprise applications. 3ware sells through VARs, OEMs and System Integrators. 3ware, Inc. is located in Sunnyvale, California with sales offices and distribution in the USA, Europe, Asia and Japan. 3ware is on the Web at www.3ware.com
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