[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Joshua Snyder]

<snip>
On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Dave McGuire wrote:
>    As I understand it, serial ATA implements most of the SCSI command
> set over a high-speed serial link.
>
>    ...which makes me wonder...why not just use FC-AL?  It implements the
> SCSI command set over a high-speed serial link.  Sound familiar? ;)
> And FC-AL is standardized, chipsets area already out there, it's
> scalable to VERY high speeds, etc.

Yeah, your half right about serial ata supporting most of the SCSI command
set.  In the first gen spec the protocol supports all of the nice SCSI
style commands but the drives don't have to support them, but all of the
controllers do.  I think that they did this to ease transition to Sata.
This way they can put a Sata to Pata bridge chip on to a drive and ship it
as a Sata drive. The Second gen Sata (the 300Meg/sec spec) requires that
the drives implement the full command set.

Currently I only know of one drive that supports the full command set.
It's the 10k rpm Sata drive from Western Digital.  I recently got one of
these drives mostly just to see what real Sata was like.  It's not bad,
it's not as fast as my 15k rpm cheetah but it is as fast as any 10k rpm
scsi drive that I have used... I will say that I haven't used any
current 10k rpm scsi drives so a current scsi drive might be faster.

<snip>
>    I think their point was to have "ATA" in the name and be able to say
> "it's not SCSI" because the PeeCee weenies are being trained that SCSI
> is somehow bad because it's more expensive than ATA
> gigabyte-for-gigabyte.
>
> > Besides, as far as I am aware, the next thing to come about is serial
> > scsi.
> > This might actually be interesting.

Yeah, Sata is just ATA in name.  I think it's not so much that PeeCee
weenies think that SCSI is bad just that it is expensive.  Funny that you
should mention Serial SCSI, did you know that Serial SCSI drives will work
with a Sata controller.  So if you have your new Serial SCSI drive you
could plug it into a standard Sata controller and it would work just fine.
It just slows down to the 150meg/sec speeds... Serial SCSI is starting out
at 300meg/sec...  for now this isn't that big of a deal seeing how most
drives can't do over 80meg/sec...

>
>    Read about FC-AL, aka FibreChannel.  That's essentially what it is.
> It works, it's SCREAMING fast, it's standardized, it's supported, and
> it's readily available.
>
>             -Dave
>

I agree with every thing you say about FC-AL... but the only part that
isn't very standard is when you a drive in a machine that doesn't have a
FC-AL backplane... I don't think that they would want everyone using
t-cards to hookup drives in their systems.  That and they like charging an
arm and a leg for new FC-AL stuff...

				josh

> --
> Dave McGuire                 "You don't have Vaseline in Canada?"
> St. Petersburg, FL                     -Bill Bradford
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