Your Next Hard Drive

The 2-inch-wide parallel ATA ribbon cables in your PC are as familiar as the old pair of sneakers in your closet. But like the soles on those shoes, parallel ATA is wearing thin, having hit its data-transfer-rate limit of 133MB per second.

Enter Serial ATA, the successor technology we examined on a prototype hard drive from Seagate. Debuting with a speed of 150 MBps and having the potential to scale up to 600 MBps, Serial ATA provides the headroom needed for faster drives in the future. And because it uses 3-volt (instead of 5-volt) signals, it will work better with the low-power motherboard chip sets and CPUs coming soon.

Unlike parallel ATA drives, the serial model we installed in our Windows 2000 test system required no master or slave designation. We simply plugged one end of the 0.25-inch cable into the drive and the other into a supplied Silicon Image Serial ATA card that we plugged into a PCI slot. (The thin cable also permits better airflow and more-compact system designs.)

Seagate will offer its Serial ATA drive this fall. Maxtor and Western Digital promise to provide the interface on some drives by year's end--about when Via expects to integrate it into PC chip sets. Intel plans to follow suit in 2003.

Users also have new capacities to look forward to, thanks to an increase in drive-platter areal density from 40GB to 60GB. With two platters, Seagate's Barracuda ATA V will hold 120GB. Western Digital's new Caviar model should reach 200GB. Later this fall, look for both Maxtor and IBM to launch their own ultrahigh-capacity products as well. (See our hard drives buyers' guide for more.)