MOST NEW MOTHERBOARDS will have Serial ATA connectors during the course of this year, but hard drive manufacturers seem a little slow to jump on the mobo bandwagon.
Seagate looks like it will be first off the block, however. The firm has already distributed S-ATA drives to hardware review sites and it looks like quantities will be available towards the end of this month.
But Seagate leads the pack on the drive technology, and although other manufacturers also have plans to release S-ATA drives, it looks like volumes won't be available for some months to come. Last September, the Serial ATA Working Group released its first specification of version II. At the time, a representative of Intel said we could expect to see drives in some quantity during this year.
In October, market research firm iSuppli said that we will see Serial ATA as a mainstream product sometime in the middle of this year. But it won't be until late 2004 that this type of hard drive will exceed parallel ATA systems, and it won't be until 2006 that the change over is complete, iSuppli reckoned.
News source: The Inq
