Western Digital Raptor Preview: 10,000RPM & Serial ATA

ABIT's Serillel Adapter - Poor Man's Serial ATA

The first and most obvious way of migrating to Serial ATA cabling is by purchasing a Serial ATA hard drive. Seagate is the first to market with a native Serial ATA hard drive, with the rest of the usual suspects due to ship their SATA drives in the near future.

Next, there's the idea of using a Parallel-Serial converter to take a regular ATA/100/133 drive and use SATA cabling to connect it to a SATA controller. ABIT makes one such controller that they like to call their Serillel adapter; it ships with a number of their newer motherboards.

The Serillel adapter only requires that you assign your IDE drive to be a master, before plugging the device into your drive. Then you attach a floppy power cable to power the adapter and, plug in your hard drive and you're done.

The Parallel-Serial converter simply has an IC that takes the incoming requests and translates them into requests that can be understood by either the PATA or SATA interface, depending on which end of the line we're talking about. Since these requests come in at a relatively slow frequency (we're not talking about a 400MHz Memory Translator Hub here), processing them isn't very difficult and the performance hit is negligible as you can see from the charts on the next page...