Throughout the last six years, the ATA standard has been the one constant in the PC storage industry. No longer.
On Tuesday, Maxtor officially announced the ATA-133 storage standard. ATA-133 is an interface designed to bridge the gap between ATA-100 drives and Serial ATA, whose one-year delay at Intel was first reported by ExtremeTech.
However, the new ATA-133 interface won't be supported by Intel itself, the largest chip set manufacturer in the industry. An official at Seagate Technology also gave a thumbs-down to the new technology in favor of Serial ATA. IBM's Storage Systems Division remains undecided, as does Acer Laboratories, a smaller chip set house. Chip set manufacturers Via Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems, however, have endorsed the new standard.
The result: a split in the storage industry for the first time since 1994, when Western Digital came up with the Enhanced IDE specification. PC buyers and builders will now have to factor in storage questions when choosing a chip set provider, observers concluded.
The struggle once again pits Intel and Via, the two largest chip set suppliers, against each other. Maxtor, which captured the top spot in drive manufacturing when it acquired the hard disk drive division of Quantum, also will take on second-ranked Seagate with the new standard. An additional question mark is the optical storage market, analysts said, which has yet to weigh in on the ATA-133/Serial ATA debate.
"This certainly has the potential for throwing a lot of monkey wrenches into (the storage industry)," one market watcher concluded.
The debate lies in the need for faster data transfer rates, specifically the question of whether hard-disk drives are pushing the limits of the 100MB-per-second ATA-100 interface. Officials at one drive maker not supporting the standard scoffed at the notion that data rates would push beyond 100MB per second by 2003, when Intel's fifth I/O Controller Hub (ICH-5) is due to ship. Originally, the 150MB Serial ATA standard was due next year in ICH-4, but Intel officials confirmed a one-year delay last week.
Others drew different conclusions. "I don't know about that," said Dennis Waid, an analyst at Peripheral Research in Santa Barbara, "There are certain applications that are already seeing the need for higher data rates."
Over 2 billion ATA ports have shipped since the interface was created, according to Scott Stetzer, technical marketing manager at Maxtor, in Milpitas, "We don't want to lose the installed base," he said.
Stetzer claimed drive makers were entering a "danger zone" where a disk drive's interface could be bottlenecked by the combination of high peak data rates and the ability of the interface to handle data overhead, such as interrupts and other commands. "We want to have the interface there and available, he said.
ATA-133 will be licensed on a royalty-free basis, Stetzer said. He declined to say when ATA-133-compatible products would ship. Since the standard is backwards-compatible with previous ATA interfaces, ATA-100 products will interface to an ATA-133 port, but not enjoy the faster data transfer rates.
ATA-133, like Serial ATA, can also be supported through discrete add-on cards, although this adds additional cost. A public presentation by Michael Alexenko, director of I/O strategy at Maxtor, leaked to ExtremeTech and allegedly created this month, does not even contain any mention of the ATA-133 standard.
As one of the founding members of the Serial ATA Working Group, Intel will not support the new standard, however. "Intel is putting its efforts behind Serial ATA ... over parallel ATA," said Jason Ziller, technology initiatives manager for Intel, Ziller is also chairman of the Serial ATA Working Group.
"As such, Intel has no plans to support ATA-133 in its chip sets," he said.
