I have a question about serial ata that I can't find the answer to. Couldn't find any articles on anandtech with the info and didn't want to cheapen myself by registering to post in their forum.

It looks like you only get 1 sata device per cable?

All sata cables I have seen have only 2 connectors (controller and HD).

Sata hard drives do not have "in" and "out" connectors like scsi. (I know this is not what is meant by the "serial" in sata but one way to get more than 1 device per cable that I considered)

Sata pci card I saw has only 2 connections, motherboards seem only to have 2 connections also. (I thought perhaps 1 cable per drive but more connections per controller. Doesn't seem to be the case)

So, are we loosing half of our ide devices per controller when we move from pata to sata?(ignoring the other detriments to moving to sata like drives that are small, cost twice as much, and aren't any faster)

PM if you want.


P.S. Perhaps I haven't spent 15 hours searching for the answer to this question. Go ahead and flame me if you want, but answer my question first.

right, it there wont be much of an improvment if any. most hard drives can barely reach ATA100 right now so there would be no notice of any increase speed of data transfer. Only thing going for it now is low power consumption and thin cables.

BTW: my mom helped me write this post so she could correct my grammar and spelling

Don't forget to tell her "Happy Mother's Day"

With SATA only one device can be connected to a cable.

Today there aren't many advantages for moving to SATA. The major advantages seem to be a performance increase in a RAID configuration, smaller cables so you get better airflow inside the case, improved data transmission and hot plug capability.

Today the SATA spec is for 150 MB/s. I've read reports that there should be an increase to 300 MB/s sometime in 2004 and an eventual increase to 600 MB/s. As we move forward in time, I believe SATA HDD's will eventually replace EIDE HDD's. We shall see.

I would sooner switch to scsi if I am going to go from 4 ide devices to 2. What are you supposed to do with that? You can't even make a 0+1 raid or any of the other professional raids with only 2 devices. Even if you did make a raid 0 then you would have to chuck your dvd / cdrom / cdburner / zip. I guess you could have on-board sata and also a pci sata controller but that would barely make things comparable. Now if you had a mboard that had 2 eide controllers (for cd/dvd/burners/zip/old HD) and 2 sata connections that might be workable. You are going to need 4 sata connections to make a respectable raid though.

Yupp, that's what my mobo has. ASUS A7N8X DLX.