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Simon · Jun 29, 2002, 02:52 AM

Why are there no native FireWire devices? HDs, CDRWs, DVDs, etc. it's all crappy ATA with a bridge. FireWire (as of today at least) has 400Mb/s = 50MB/s. My LaCie external FireWire HD does about < 6MB/s. I could imagine that this rate would be much better with native FireWire devices. So why not? FireWire is cheap, fast and you could even use it internally to connect drives to the MB, i.e. less cable chaos and cheap serial instead of more expensive parallel.

What's the reason for everybody sticking with ATA?

Ken_F2 · Jun 29, 2002, 04:04 AM

simon,

Obviously because there is no market demand for the Firewire drives. Or at least, demand is not sufficient to warrant the development and release. Vendors like Lacie rebadge products to serve very small niche markets. Seagate and Western Digital have no interest in producing drives to target 4% or less of the consumer market.

And why would you use Firewire internally when you can use ATAPI? That said, drive vendors are slowly moving away from ATAPI; by this time next year, all the latest/fastest drives will use Serial ATA. Seagate <a href="http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,,1455,00.html" target="_blank">recently announced</a> that all new drive models will be available in Serial ATA versions; it seems their fastest consumer drives will be available only in Serial ATA versions. Serial ATA addon boards are now available for the PC, and Serial ATA will be standard in all new AMD and Intel PCs starting in early 2003. You can read more about it <a href="http://www.seagate.com/products/discsales/discnew/" target="_blank">right here</a> on Seagate's site.

Simon · Jul 1, 2002, 03:38 AM

Ken_F2, thanks for the info. Serial ATA seems to be a nice thing but then I read that DRM will be in there as well and I don't like that at all. A fast serial bus is fine with me; maybe cheaper than ATA (and less big cables) and for sure easier to maintain than SCSI.
But still, I don't understand where the problem is or was: FireWire came out years ago and it worked. Why did all the drive manufacturers have to wait until Serial ATA came along (actually we won't have it until another couple of months) before they implemented a faster, cheaper and simpler bus? Sopunds to me like "well, we don't use stuff from Apple, we prefer waiting til Intel and Co. start something" and if it's like that... well that's BS. Then again, Serial ATA is supposed to be even faster than FireWire 2 - but will that really be measureable in real-world tests? <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

Simon

Ken_F2 · Jul 1, 2002, 02:23 PM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />But still, I don't understand where the problem is or was: FireWire came out years ago and it worked. Why did all the drive manufacturers have to wait until Serial ATA came along (actually we won't have it until another couple of months) before they implemented a faster, cheaper and simpler bus?<hr /></blockquote>Well remember, for a long time, Apple wanted a $1 license fee for every Firewire implementation. As a result, PC mainboard vendors could not integrate it onto their motherboards (PC chipsets that run motherboards sell for $15 to $30, so $1 is a significant). I believe they did away with this fee earlier this year, and now it seems that every new $125 PC motherboard incorporates Firewire.

With its 50 megabytes per sec throughput, Firewire is significantly slower than the current ATA100, ATA133, and SCSI standards. On the latest hard drives, there is a significant dropoff in performance from ATA100 to ATA33, and a small dropoff in performance from ATA100 to ATA66 on the latest hard drives...Firewire should land somewhere in between. We have yet to see widespread availability of Firewire devices using the new 800Mbps (= 100 megabytes per sec) standard.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Firewire is that it offers no backward compatibility. Firewire hard drives are not bootable via any PC bios. There are plenty of Firewire controller cards for the PC, but PCs cannot be booted from drives on these devices; instead, they require that a driver be loaded in the OS for support (which means that another boot drive is needed). Hard drives are sold not simply for use in new PCs, but as upgrades for older PCs as well, so this presents a problem. In contrast, Serial ATA was designed in such a way that it is compatible with older PCs; the user of an old PC can install a Serial ATA PCI card, and they will be able to boot from a brand new Serial ATA drive.

Serial ATA should be significantly faster than Firewire for hard drive type use. Not necessarily because of the throughput differences, but because it was designed for the ground up for storage. With Serial ATA, you get command queuing, out-of-order execution/delivery, data scatter/gathering, robust data error detection and correction, and much more; it also provides for complete management of fan control, activity indicators, drive temperature notification, drive health, etc. Basically, Serial ATA implements everything SCSI had for performance, plus all sorts of features to ease/improve drive usability and management. Other advantages of Serial ATA:

1. Uses less pins on interface chips = very cheap to implement
2. Chips run at much lower voltages (as low as 1.2V) = reduces power requirements substantially; cheaper to implement.
3. Hot swap capability.
4. Future generations of standard will support as great as 10 gigabytes per second of throughput.
5. Backward compatibility with older PC system bios

Serial ATA was designed and is promoted by a group of manufacturers that includes APT Technologies, Quantum Corporation (before they merged), Seagate Technology, Western Digital, IBM, Dell, and Intel. Serial ATA is designed for internal use only, so it won't compete with Firewire for external disks and media devices. Basically, the standard was in good part designed by hard drive vendors for hard drives.

Simon · Jul 2, 2002, 02:33 AM

Ken_F2, thanks again for the interesting info. It seems clear to me now why vendors are pushing sATA instead of FireWire.
This is of course somewhat sad. If sATA is adopted vendors will again probably have no (or too few) reasons to support FireWire natively. Too bad, the fast FireWire just loses too much speed in these bridges...