Hard drive makers soft pedal S-ATA cycle

THE PROMISE, GREAT PROMISE, OF SERIAL ATA, now built ready for use into plenty of brand new motherboards, looks like it may make quite some time to materialise, just as analysts predicted during the hype season last year.

And it's partly due to a series of stumbles and missteps with price wars compounding the problem for the hard drive makers.

A source close to Western Digital claimed that it could be June before we'll see drives from WD, although major drive maker Seagate already has Barracuda units shipping.

Currently the manufacturers make fattish margins on enterprise hard drives when there's a healthy market for the drives.

But down at the low end things are tougher than ever and many hard drive makers don't want to make things worse by introducing S-ATA too early and rocking the boat too wildly.

Lack of SCSI drive sales have already cut into many of the manufacturers' bottom line, and in any case S-ATA I apparently won't be anything as good as Son of S-ATA, S-ATA Two.

While S-ATA one has a hot plug capability, smaller cables, and gets rid of that master-slave jumper tomfoolery, the data rates for the drives don't add up to much benefit for anyone, the drives will be more expensive than parallel right at the start and further, there only appears to be one major supplier for the semiconductors, to wit Marvel.

Son of S-ATA is going to be much better, apparently, and the main reason for the change to Serial ATA is that data rates on ribbon cable parallel interfaces are just about at their limit.

The Lovely Son of S-ATA, Serial ATA II, can double data rates to 300MB/s, allow daisy chaining of drives, and drives powered at a lovely cool 3.3 volts.

It's all a big change, but we think the major hard drive manufacturers are the 21st century of Marie Antoinette now and while the natives are revolting outside the window, can merely utter: "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche".

Like, if we can't see much of S-ATA I yet, when will we see volumes of S-ATA II? µ

See Also
Seagate leads in Serial ATA storage
Serial ATA solutions lag expectations
Seriall ATA needs big vendor boost
Serial ATA - not quite ready to go-go