On the website of Acard, the manufacturer of the IDE-to-SCSI adaptor, you can see that these people are still busy and have released new adaptors. Now they support transfer rates up to 160 MB/sec (LVD-SCSI).
The new port is one of the climaxes of the Computex. More and more manufacturers of mainboards, controllers, and hard drives have products with the successor of IDE and E-IDE (up to UDMA-133) in the program. Serial ATA should replace the parallel ATA complete until February 2003.
The advantage of SATA is the easier and more stable connecting. Timing problems are history. Also the new cables with 4 to 8 poles ease the circulation of air inside the tower because they are not blocking the stream.
SATA uses up to 4 direct point-to-point connections between controller and one device per connection. This doubles the maximum of possible devices. Problems with jumpers and bus-termination are no longer expected, because every wire is terminated at both ends in the chip. A defective device will not effect the others.
SATA is designed for using period of 10 years with two duplications of performance up to 600 MB/sec. At start a transfer rate of 150 MB/sec is supported, slighlty less than LVD-SCSI with 160 MB/sec. Some of the other features are the break through of the 137 GB limit of harddrives, "hot-plug"-abilities, and 1st-Party-DMA.
The first devices will maybe available in third quarter 2002, but some manufacturers of mainboards have started to implement it into their chipsets.
Amiga users can use the new harddrives with an adaptor on normal ATA ports (from UDMA-33) or (maybe the better solution) with bridge adaptors on SCSI. A question about that is send to ACARD, but still on the way. The answer will be presented here.
(ps) (Translation: gf)
[News message: 11. Jun. 2002, 16:06] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
