Hard drives have long used the familiar ribbon cables. These cables are bulky, inflexible, fragile, too short and prone to interference. With CPU's running in the multiple gigahertz, and RAM so inexpensive, the last great bottleneck in computers these days has remained the ATA hard drive. A new standard has been developed by the industry to supercede these limitations of parallel ATA storage devices.

"It will all be worth it in the end. With 150 MByte/s, simpler cabling and guaranteed compatibility with earlier parallel ATA standards, Serial ATA looks set to become the dominant interface for hard disks."

Ironic that serial communications, which rely on only two data channels (one for sending and one for receiving), are faster than parallel. At one time, serial technology was considered obsolete. Super-fast serial standards developed in recent years include USB, FireWire, Ethernet and more.

The Serial ATA standard has been developed to be backward-compatible with existing software, operating systems and drivers.

Several motherboard manufactures have been shipping Serial ATA-capable motherboards for several months in anticipation of the new standard. While the first hard drives conforming to this specification have been on the market for a few months, Western Digital is set to be the first manufacturer to release a drive that will surpass the traditional speed limitation of 7200 r.p.m. To be released later this week, WD's new drives promise to run at 10,000 r.p.m. with an 8MB cache. The drives include a 5-year warranty. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Back To The Future: Serial ATA Arrives At Last
Enabling the Future: The Serial ATA Working Group

09 February 2003  |   permalink