WD upguns Serial ATA Caviars

WD has announced the addition of 3 gbps SATA transfer to the long standing Caviar line on the venerable 80GB platters. They have announced the WDxxxxJS SKUs which will pack 7200RPM spindles, 8MB buffers, and SATA 3gbps transfer into drives of 120, 160, 200, and 250GB capacity. Check out the data here.

This looks like a marketing gimmick. No mention of NCQ or any other SATA-II features, although the new 300MB/sec transfer rate will doubtlessly be featured rather prominently on marketing literature and retail boxes. They may not have even gotten rid of the PATA bridge chip on these units - they don't make any statements to the contrary. WD's drives would be much more compelling it they would accept the SATA standards and move to a cheaper in the long run native SATA logic.

Do any of WD's drives support NCQ?
I know the raptor does not as it has the more limited TCQ
but I don't know about any of their other SATA products

The NCQ thing probobly comes down to licensing or a limitation of the bridge chip
If a native SATA soln was cheaper it would have been implemented ages ago, the margin on HD's is low enough that even saving $.05 on a HD will make a noticable diference on your end of year results

WD has not sold a SCSI HD in ages
its possible that they no longer have anyone in house with any experience in implementing NCQ systems

WD has announced one NCQ ready drive, the SE 16. It's a 250GB/7200/16MB/SATA 300 unit. AFAIK, it is not available for retail pruchase yet.

The native SATA is quite a bit cheaper for the maker going forward, although it requires initial investment in designing the new logic. Once the logic is developed, the maker realizes substantial savings as fewer chips are required on the PCB, the chips that are required are smaller (serial vs 16-bit paralell) and they take up less space on the PCB.

It is true that WD has not developed a SCSI drive in years, however they can make solid SCSI level drives - WD740GD is actually competitive with, although still somewhat behind, 10K SCSI units of similar geometry and age in both desktop and server performance.

DougLite said:

WD has announced one NCQ ready drive, the SE 16. It's a 250GB/7200/16MB/SATA 300 unit. AFAIK, it is not available for retail pruchase yet.

The native SATA is quite a bit cheaper for the maker going forward, although it requires initial investment in designing the new logic. Once the logic is developed, the maker realizes substantial savings as fewer chips are required on the PCB, the chips that are required are smaller (serial vs 16-bit paralell) and they take up less space on the PCB.

It is true that WD has not developed a SCSI drive in years, however they can make solid SCSI level drives - WD740GD is actually competitive with, although still somewhat behind, 10K SCSI units of similar geometry and age in both desktop and server performance.

Click to expand...

my point in the scsi comment was simply limited to a lack of a design person with NCQ experience. as the SCSI standard has NCQ in it and most every SCSI HD built today supports it. since there was a gap between when they stopped shipping SCSI drives and when they started shipping SATA drives i find it possible that the entire scsi design team may have been nixed getting rid of anyone with some NCQ experience

WD in geneeral breaks all the rules, they are the only large HD maker that does not ship a SCSI drive. Their HD's have, in general, the shortest warrenty in the industry and they are the only ones shipping an enterprise class (10k+) SATA drive

There is some advantage to waiting for technology to mature a little before implementing it. When i started recieving SATA based systems from name brand vendors (IBM, HP, DELL, Micron, Acer) 2 out of 3 systems shipped to me were DOA becuase of SATA cables disconnecting during shipping, even now 2 years later its still 1/5

SATA is a half descent standard with the exception of the connectors, whoever did them needs to be draged out into the street and shot

"WD has announced the addition of 3 gbps SATA transfer to the long standing Caviar line on the venerable 80GB platters. "

"This looks like a marketing gimmick."

Saddly for the time being it is a gimmick. The internal transfer rate of the drives currently can't even hit the 150MB/s mark that SATA advertises, so doubling the external transfer rate will do nothing except in configerations using numerous drives behind a port multiplier. What I'm really looking forward to is the new Seagate 7200.9 drives due out at the end of August / early September.

StorageJoe said:

"WD has announced the addition of 3 gbps SATA transfer to the long standing Caviar line on the venerable 80GB platters. "

"This looks like a marketing gimmick."

Saddly for the time being it is a gimmick. The internal transfer rate of the drives currently can't even hit the 150MB/s mark that SATA advertises, so doubling the external transfer rate will do nothing except in configerations using numerous drives behind a port multiplier. What I'm really looking forward to is the new Seagate 7200.9 drives due out at the end of August / early September.

Click to expand...

The 8meg buffer can easily transmit at 300mb/sec... the faster SATA interface is almost soley for faster buffer transfers. But it turns out not to help that much in real world tests.

tiebird321 said:

my point in the scsi comment was simply limited to a lack of a design person with NCQ experience. as the SCSI standard has NCQ in it and most every SCSI HD built today supports it. since there was a gap between when they stopped shipping SCSI drives and when they started shipping SATA drives i find it possible that the entire scsi design team may have been nixed getting rid of anyone with some NCQ experience

Click to expand...

Thats not quite right. Yes the SCSI standard has a version of TCQ in it, but the SATA NCQ is only loosely related to it. They have a few of the same features but are still very different.

Additionally, its doubtful that their SCSI and ATA drives shared the same codebase, so it would be difficult to leverage the work done on SCSI TCQ to implement SATA NCQ. So whether the engineers were still there or not, there would still be a difficult time implementing a different feature on a different interface with a different codebase.