Serial ATA Features

The most important problem however is the technology is simply ending the near of its life. During the Serial ATA presentation attendees were told that unless radically new changes are made to the Parallel ATA interface, 100-133MB/second appears to be the limit of the technology.

With these key issues in mind, APT Technologies, Dell, IBM, Intel, Maxtor, Quantum, and Seagate have developed the specifications for Parallel ATA's successor: Serial ATA.

Making it happen

First off, one of the key design goals of Serial ATA was to provide a seamless transition from Parallel ATA. While there will obviously be a hardware change, there should be no impact on the software side in terms of driver or OS changes.

At the same time the group wanted a standard with plenty of headroom, 10 years was the number given during the presentation. Already the preliminary specs call for two doublings in performance for Serial ATA after its initial release.

Another issue with Parallel ATA - the bulky cables - will be addressed with Serial ATA. The cables demonstrated were considerably thinner than conventional ATA cables used today and are thankfully much more flexible as well. In addition, the pin count for Serial ATA has been reduced from 52 pins in Parallel ATA to only 4.

Inside of a Serial ATA system

See how small the Serial ATA connector is?

Power consideration for notebooks is also considered in the design. While no power estimates were given for interface electronics, signal transmission for Serial ATA is significantly lower than Parallel ATA.

Of course, all this means nothing if Serial ATA costs a lot to implement. One figure shown during the Serial ATA presentation listed the cost to manufacture the connector and cable is currently projected at $1.00.

Keeping it simple

Serial ATA will be used solely "inside-the-box." There are no plans for Serial ATA to connect with external devices such as scanners or camcorders. Serial ATA will be used just as Parallel ATA is used today: for storage devices such as hard drives and CD-ROM drives.

This brings up an important principle the design group mandated when developing the specifications for Serial ATA: "don't lose focus."

Rather than add additional features that would complicate the design, the design group wanted to focus on creating an implementation that met their goals and objectives: creating a cost effective implementation that offered improved performance and a seamless transition from Parallel ATA.

Serial ATA is not meant to compete with other technologies such as USB 2.0 or Firewire, merely complement them.