Future Hard Drives Technology

With the upcoming ATA/133 standard pushing the limits of the maximum transfer rates supported by the Parallel ATA interface, the next step to revolutionize hard disk interfaces will be Serial ATA. It offers greater speed, easier fabrication and application. Find, compare and buy Hard Drives!

The Serial ATA interface is to ATA what FireWire is to SCSI. The entire approach is to convert the parallel standard that is used by existing ATA interfaces to a serial format (where one bit is transferred at a time) so that higher data transfer frequencies can be supported. Also, this approach greatly simplifies the fabrication of cables and connecting wires that are used by the interface, since there are fewer signals to deal with, facilitating a less cluttered cabinet.

This translates into easier airflow within the system and subsequently more efficient cooling. In fact. Serial ATA uses just four signal pins (there are a total of seven pins; the others are used for transmitting overhead commands) that actually carry the data and include the power and ground pins. This is significantly lower than the 80 lines that are used in today's ATA/100 and ATA/133 cables. This standard will support transfer rates of up to 150 MBps.

Also, since this is a point-to-point protocol, there will be no place for master and slave devices on a single cable—and bandwidth will not need to be shared between devices. Another big advantage with this standard is that it is backward compatible with the existing parallel ATA standard at the driver level. Therefore, all existing applications that use the parallel ATA standard can be fully extended to support serial ATA.

The Next Generation Hard drive for the Primary Storage

Emerging technology plays a big role in today's business. Peripherals like motherboards, processors and other system components are getting faster and demand much more bandwidth from internal and external interfaces. The world of hard drive manufacturers is changing and the demand for storage is also on the rise.

Welcome to the next generation revolution in hard disk interface, the Serial ATA, popularly known as SATA. SATA is one such standard that will be hitting the internal interface industry with a big bang.

Future Hard drive technology - SATA

Seven key industries worked together to develop a working group for Serial ATA in February 2000 and named it the SATA workgroup. The promoters were: APT Technologies, Dell Computers, IBM, Intel, Maxtor Corporation, Quantum Corporation, and Seagate Technologies. Of these,

Intel has been the leading player on the host side, with Maxtor taking a key role on the device side. By December 2000, there were more than 70 contributing companies covering the disciplines required to enable this technology. Serial ATA interface helps transfer data at a speed of 150 MBps with ease and is moving on to pick up speeds of up to 300 MBps by 2005 and 600 MBps by 2010.

This interface is completely different from parallel ATA interface. The serial ATA interface is small thin cable with 7 connector as against a normal 40- or 80-pin cable, which translates to a complete reduction in the number of jumbled up wires within the cabinet.

One such formation of eight companies, including some of the largest names in Japan's electronics industry, have formed a consortium to promote and license a new removable hard disk system for use in personal computers and consumer electronics devices.

Future Hard drive technology Group

The IVDR, or Information Versatile Disk for Removable usage consortium, was established by Canon, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Phoenix Technologies, Pioneer, Sanyo Electric, Sharp, and Victor of Japan, along with support from electronics connector maker FCI Japan and computer peripherals maker Mitsumi Electric.

IVDR disks are little more than conventional 2.5 inch hard disk drives of the type commonly found in notebook computers, and increasingly in consumer electronics products such as digital video recorders and some digital music players. To the conventional drive, the consortium members have added a new connector, better suited to such a removable system, and also a plastic case to protect the drive.

Led by Sanyo, which first considered such a system two years ago, the consortium members began discussing removable hard disk drives as a solution to an ever more common problem: as hard disk drive technology continues increasing, maximum drive capacity is roughly doubling each year which means that consumers who buy a product designed to last several years will very soon be left behind by drive technology.

As for cost, the group expects IVDR drives to retail for around 10 or 20 per cent more than a PC hard disk drive. The highest capacity 2.5 inch hard disk drives available now, at around 60 GB, already have six times the capacity of double-sided DVD-RAM disks and exceed the capacity of the Blu-ray optical disk format. Blu-ray was proposed in February by some of the same companies, but is not expected in the stores for at least a year. Cost and reliability are two major factors, which will decide the next generation hard drive technology. Let us wait and check which hard disk technology emerges as leader.

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