When are sata laptops going mainstream?
When the drives cost less than conventional ones, and are available from
more manufacturers. It is a bit like the 100GB HD's, which are still like
'rocking horse teeth' in laptops, yet have been available for over a year.
Remember that the performance of 2.5" IDE drives, is significantly below
that of 3.5" drives, and generally also have smaller caches, so there is
even less 'gain' than is seen normally between parallel ATA, and serial
ATA (the difference is barely measurable on the fastest drives available).
The smaller wiring overhead, is a big 'plus' for the laptop boards, but
since the parallel ATA interface will still have to be implemented from
the chipset for devices like the DVD drives, the savings cannot really be
made in terms of board space. Now that SATA DVD drives are appearing, the
potential exists to completely 'switch' to SATA, and save significant
board space.
It will happen on the more expensive laptops first, and in a year, expect
many models to exist. However the speed gains, will only be because these
are the 'newest' drive models, not because of any inherent advantage of
SATA.
Best Wishes
