Anybody have any real world experience with Serial ATA? I am about to buy 2 or 3 new drives for a RAID in my home server. I thought I would give SATA a shot, but the drives seam to be nearly impossible to find. SATA controller cards and motherboards are affordable and easy to find, but the only drive I can find in stock anywhere is a Seagate 80Gig (which I found some not very flattering reviews on). Supposedly there is a Maxtor out that gets some pretty good reviews and is supposed to be pretty comparable in price to their ATA133 drives, but I can't find it anywhere. Anybody know if it is available in the wild yet? Pricewatch doesn't even aknowledge it's existance and I can't think of any other good sites to try at the moment.

Thanks,
-Mike

AFIAK, the Maxtor isn't widely available, yet. I am considering picking up a few as well. The others that are out at the moment aren't all that impressive. So, I'd say just wait for the Maxtor, or even for a future model. From the looks of it, it will be well worth the wait.

just wait for the Maxtor

Sounds good in theory, but a couple of my partitions managed to eat themselves over the weekend. As a result the machine is dead until I reinstall the OS and rearrange some stuff (which I need more drive space to do without loosing about 40Gigs of mp3s). So I think I am going to be making a trip to Fry's tonight and see what I can find. I may just end up with an SATA controller and a couple of regular drives via converters for now.

-Mike

but a couple of my partitions managed to eat themselves over the weekend

Oh, not good. I didn't realize it was so urgent. In that case, let us know how it performs once you have it up and running. I have a A7V8X that I'm just itching to buy some drives for. I'll probably end up waiting for the Maxtors to be more readily available before I even think of picking one up. Of course, unless I run into drive failures, as you have. If I can manage it, I might even wait until the beginning of next year before picking up a drive. Knowing me, though, I won't.

I was pretty excited about this stuff as well, but I want to see the results after the first batch of products is released. In another thread, someone linked a review of Western Digital's drive, and it did okay, but not spectacular. In fact, in many areas it lost out to the 200GB SE drive that WD has out. As they said, that was just a demo unit, so lets hope the actual drives are better. I've got an Asus A7N8X that supports SATA, and I've been pretty interested in it, if not for any other reason but the fact that the cables will be much smaller now

Hi, Ricin.

Hehe. You finally noticed that, huh?

Is it different for different users? Kewl!

In that case, let us know how it performs once you have it up and running.

Well I had to pass on SATA for this round of upgrades. I didn't want to spend the money on the Seagate 80Gig drives given the reviews I found for them and I couldn't find an SATA RAID controller anyway. I ended up with a couple of the nice WD 120G Special Edition drives and a Promise ATA 133 RAID card. 240Gigs of storage and a good enough controller for about $300 was a pretty easy sell, even if I junk it all in a year and go to SATA.

Setting up the RAID under the promise BIOS was such a piece of cake after dealing with vinum on this machine for the last couple of years. It took about an hour to install the drives and card and get FreeBSD reinstalled and semi-configured. Now I have to sort through my old partitions that didn't get nuked and figure out what I still care about and then I can get rid of all the oddball, hand-me-down drives that where in this machine.

-Mike

Not for everyone, but yes.

Nice. I probably would have done the same at the moment. I have 4 of those WD SE 120gb drives, and I love 'em. The Promise cards are great. I never delt with the standalone cards until just a few weeks ago, but like the on-board chipsets, they are very nice, and easy to configure.

In another thread, someone linked a review of Western Digital's drive, and it did okay, but not spectacular.

That was a pre-production model, it seems they have improved quite a lot since then.
From storagereview.com :

Our preview noted the following:

Many readers may be disappointed with the Raptor's relatively lackluster desktop performance. For various reasons, enthusiasts view an increased spindle speed as the largest factor in single-user performance. The reality, however, is that desktop usage predominately consists of highly-localized patterns and is affected more by caching strategies than marginal mechanical improvements. Western Digital's JB series may very well continue to stand as the premiere choice for those seeking the ultimate in single-user speed.

We're more concerned with the Raptor's server performance. While it is definitely a step above standard 7200 RPM ATA drives, the beta Raptor trails today's 10k RPM SCSI drives by substantial margins. If WD and SATA are to have a chance at cracking the enterprise market, the Raptor's multi-user performance must approach the levels delivered by Cheetahs and Atlases.

In the end, ironically, the Raptor is a world-class desktop unit and a decent but unspectacular server performer. As we have already remarked, the Raptor's server performance falls somewhere between that of a 10k SCSI drive and 7200 RPM ATA units. It can admirably fill the niche formerly served by the defunct 7200 RPM SCSI segment. To have a shot at higher-end multi-user applications, however, future Raptors will have to incorporate command queuing, a feature that allows SCSI drives to scale well beyond the Raptor's showing as I/O depths become heavier.

WD's drive, however, delivers single-user performance that matches and even exceeds not only 10k RPM SCSI but also that of 15k RPM units. It is the answer to many years of prayers from power-users and enthusiasts worldwide