Intel Developer Forum Fall 2002 - Day 1: An end to a start

More Serial ATA

Serial ATA demos were everywhere on the show floor. The Serial ATA Working Group in addition to many other companies (like Fujitsu, NEC, and Promise among others) was showing off some type of Serial ATA demo. Fujitsu demoed their MHS series of laptop drives (which are supposed to be available in 30, 40, and 60GB sizes) based on Serial ATA technology; this particular drive ran at 4200RPM.

Click to Enlarge

Promise showed off their latest Serial ATA RAID controllers, variants of which can be found on some of the latest KT400 motherboards to hit the market (ASUS and MSI’s KT400 boards have Serial ATA Promise RAID controllers onboard).

NEC showed off one of their Serial ATA cards, which was able to run a grand total of 8 Serial ATA drives. These included Serial ATA desktop drives from Maxtor (2 drives), Samsung (2 drives), Western Digital, IBM, and Seagate. The 8th drive was Fujitsu’s Serial ATA MHS laptop drive, which we just mentioned above.

Click to Enlarge

Strolling down the show floor, I caught wind of a Serial ATA demo consisting of two Serial ATA Western Digital drives (in RAID). During the demo, one of the Serial ATA connectors was slightly tugged on, causing the system to reboot. The Serial ATA connector was still in place, but apparently tugging at the tiny Serial ATA cables was enough to cause system instability (or a reboot in this case). The same wouldn't have happened had it been an IDE cable which leads us to believe that there's still a few kinks to be worked out with the Serial ATA interface before it's ready for prime-time.