The Register

Linux in, Redmond ou= t of Serial ATA party

Posted: 22/11/2000 at 02:15 GMT

The Serial ATA working group, charged with replacing clum= sy parallel ribbons as the mass storage interface inside PCs, says it has= completed version 1.0 of the specification. Publication had been mooted = for 10 October, but the public version now ought to be available for comm= ent by the end of the year.

Members include APT, which provides intellectual property for storage= interfaces, hard disk manufacturers Maxtor, IBM, Seagate and Quantum, an= d Dell and Intel. The only OS with representation on the group is Linux, = and Redmond is a notable absentee - although sources say that it's now ve= ry keen to join. When it does, it won't have input to the first specifica= tion.

But maybe that isn't such a big deal, as one of the promises of Seria= l ATA is that it presents the same view to the OS as a parallel ATA drive= , and doesn't require special device drivers.

Intel's Jeff Ravencraft, Serial ATA committee chair, told us that any= additional effort to tweak the parallel ATA interface beyond the current= ATA-100 spec wouldn't be worth the trouble. =
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"We're not sure if it's doable, and even it was, it would be a very f= ragile innovation," he said. APT's business development manager Robert St= reeby added that there would be reliability benefits for other PC compone= nts - particularly CPUs - once the requirement to support 5V I/O was remo= ved. =

But the most obvious benefit is that PCs should finally get smaller -= or at least in theory. "There's 72 square inches of cabling inside a PC.= A thin replacement makes way for better ventilation, and smaller cases."=

The first private draft spec is intended to reach 1.5Gbps throughput = speeds, although real transfer rates will max at 150Mbps. Further revisio= ns are pegged to raise this to 300 and 600Mbps.

The first spec will support a simple 1 to 1 connections, sources tell= us, with one drive to one interface. It's hoped the 1.0 draft will be ra= tified and made public by the end of the year. Streeby sees devices comin= g on stream towards the end of next year, which is rather more aggressive= a schedule than other will admit to. But with no modifications needed to= the software stack, it's down to motherboard support, so it could concei= vably squeak in. =

And with Apple removing the internal 1394 connectors from its latest = G4 towers, Serial ATA should have the volume business to itself. ®

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