Even though so far there are no HDDs in the market supporting SerialATA protocol, which Intel is pushing as an alternative solution to the today’s IDE interface, the first steps in this direction are nevertheless undertaken pretty actively. All the leading chipset makers have put South Bridges with SerialATA support onto their roadmaps. I am talking about Intel, VIA and SiS. The chipsets due in the end of this year and beginning of next year are expected to be provided with integrated SerialATA controllers already.

The external SerialATA controllers will crop up in the market much earlier. For example, Silicon Image Company announced its SerialATA chip at IDF in February and has already started shipping its Silicon Image 3112 in mass quantities. And the first one to start using this chip from Silicon Image appeared Iwill, famous for its outstanding mainboard designs.

The recently announced Iwill P4ES mainboard supports two SerialATA-50 channels due to the integrated Silicon Image 3112 controller offering 150MB/sec bandwidth.

Iwill P4ES mainboard is designed for Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz/400MHz bus and is built on i845E chipset. Also it features an AGP 4x slot, 5 PCI slots, integrated ATA/133 Promise 20275 controller. It supports AC’97 sound, Smart card reader and offers rich overclocking friendly options.

So, SerialATA mainboards have already appeared. Now we are waiting for the hard disk drives. The first HDDs supporting SerialATA interface are expected to start coming out in Q3 2002.