StealthWarriors.com - LittlePC finds its home in the back roads of the Colorado Mountains, FAQ: What is the Serial ATA Interface?

STEALTH WARRIOR eVIEW - VOLUME 03 - ISSUE 01 - JANUARY 2004

• Worlds most Powerful
Small Form PC

• Application Story

• FAQ: SERIAL ATA

• STEALTH PHILOSOPHY

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.

-Putt's Law

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Welcome to the WARRIOR eVIEW the newsletter featuring specialized computers and peripherals brought to you by Stealth Computer Corporation. Each month we’ll provide useful insights, application stories and new product announcements to keep you informed.

Feel free to forward WARRIOR eVIEW to a friend or view our past issues in the Archive. To modify your subscription, please see Subscription Services below.

JUST RELEASED! ~ Worlds most powerful small form PC
Capable of running 3.2GHz and fitting in the palm of your hand.

Continuing the tradition of providing powerful solutions for tight space applications Stealth today has released their most powerful LittlePC to date. The model LPC-420 can run at a blazing 3.2GHz making it the smallest most powerful feature rich PC available today. Housed in a rugged extruded aluminum enclosure this powerful & versatile machine measures out at only 10" x 5.8" x 2.8" (about the size of a hard cover novel) and offers features and performance that have only been available in traditional bulky desktop computers. The feature rich LPC-420 offers high-end PC graphics performance integrated into its mainboard design which runs a screaming FSB at 800MHz.

Each and every unit is shipped with on-board LAN, USB-2.0, Firewire, Audio in/out and processors ranging from the Intel P4 1.7GHz Celeron up to the 3.2GHz. Included as a standard is a slim CD-ROM with optional DVD and CD/RW drives available. The LPC-420 has unprecedented storage capability in such a small machine by offering space for one 3.5” and one 2.5” IDE Hard Disk Drive. Systems are compatible with WIN2000/XP, Linux etc and can be pre-configured if desired.

The LittlePC products serve a demanding market where powerful solutions are being deployed in space-challenged applications around the world. Stealth’s LittlePC’s are ideal for deploying in applications such as Digital Signs, Kiosks, Embedded Control, Thin-Clients, POS & Human/Machine Interface applications. Stealth offers a wide range of small form factor LittlePCs including their FANLESS, LittlePC with Expansion Slots, DC Power Input Models and their specialty LittlePC’s with PCMCIA, Multi-LAN, Compact Flash etc.

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Application Story
LittlePC finds its home in the back roads of the Colorado Mountains

Thought I would share an interesting application. My wife and I live in Colorado and spend a good bit of time in the mountains camping with our Jeep Wrangler on some very out-of-the way back roads. We installed one of your Little PCs in one of two compartments in a Tuffy overhead security console so that it can be locked up when not in use. We have installed a 7-inch 16 x 9 LCD monitor on the passenger sun visor and use a wireless keyboard and mouse to control it. The overhead console also contains a permanently mounted Garmin GPS unit, CB radio and other equipment. We have a motorcycle battery mounted in the back of the Jeep with a rectifier / isolator circuit we put together to keep the PC from rebooting when the main voltage dips when the Jeep is started. Before we make a trip we load up one of eight Delorme Colorado CD ROM disks that show us exactly where we are. A photo of our rig is attached.
Best regards.... Frank Breeze, Denver, CO

Are you using Stealth products in an interesting application? We would love to hear about how you are using our products to help solve a problem, improve a process or make something happen. If you would like to share your application story with us we will feature it right here in our future Warrior e-VIEWS.
Click here to email us your application story

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FAQ: What is the Serial ATA Interface and why is it better
The new standard in IDE hard drive interfaces

Some components used in PCs have not changed much and go back to the early days some 15 years ago. The floppy disk drive for example. Another one of the oldest standards is the IDE ribbon cable for hard drives. Besides the slight increase in data speeds, not much has really changed for the IDE cable, with the only physical change being the extra grounding wires for the ATA66 and higher standards. They are still quite a clumsy cable, however this has been slightly corrected since rounded IDE cables became popular. When most people think "serial", the most common association is with the serial ports within a PC. These are of course very slow, but synchronous serial (as opposed to the asynchronous RS232 PC standard) offers much higher data throughput. In comparison, a typical PC serial port is capable of 115kb/sec., whereas Serial ATA is capable of over 1,000,000kb/sec.!

Finally, Serial ATA offers us a much better cabling system for hard drives, with faster speeds and a better data transfer interface. It also introduces a few other changes (that are outlined below), however the biggest difference noticed is the physical aspect of the cable.

What is different?
The first obvious difference with Serial ATA is the cable. No 40-pin connectors, no messy ribbon cable, but instead a small 7-pin connector, and a cable that's only just thicker than a cable you would find on a keyboard or mouse. This is going to be beneficial to the smaller form factor PC’s keeping the internals neater while providing better air flow for thermal management.

As the name suggests, the data will be transmitted in serial format, unlike its predecessor (IDE ribbon cable), which relies on the parallel data format. This is what makes the cable itself only need seven wires, as serial essentially only has 1 send and 1 receive channel. The seven wires consist of a differential pair for both transmit and receive, as well as 3 grounds. We will see a greater speed available from the Serial ATA standard, with the initial implementation capable of 150mb/sec. with predictions that we will be seeing Serial ATA hit over 300mb/s.

Of course, the real benefit of the faster interface speeds may not translate to much in the real world. Even the fastest hard drives cannot sustain much more than 40mb/s, so only cache hits will be able to use the full 150mb/s. As hard drives advance, we can hopefully start to see them utilizing more and more of the capable bandwidth. The new standard is also backwards compatible, so it'll be easy to convert from Serial to Parallel formats, and vice versa.

Standards like USB have taken a while to fully take off when it was first introduced, but you'd be hard pressed to find any new PC without at least 2 USB ports. Like USB, Serial ATA drives will also be hot swappable, which should allow for greater flexibility. All of the major hard drive manufacturers have been busy developing Serial ATA drives, which is already a good sign. Some manufacturers may have gone for a simple solution of bridging the current controller to work with Serial ATA, but others (such as Seagate) have completely redesigned their onboard controllers to talk directly in serial mode.

It's obvious that Serial ATA standard is going to introduce some much needed changes to the way IDE data is transported, but it may take a while until we see the benefits of these changes. Serial ATA is here now for the next 10 or so years, and its nice to finally rid systems of the old bulky IDE cables.

For additional information on the Serial ATA standard please visit SATA (Serial ATA Working Group) - http://www.serialata.org

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STEALTH COMPUTER CORPORATION
Our Philosophy

We started our business quietly in 1990 because there was an unfulfilled need in the marketplace for computers and peripherals that could survive the daily battlezone conditions of the shop floor. With our engineering backgrounds in process control, instrumentation and factory automation we knew first hand what was really needed and we possessed the experience and empirical knowledge to design and create ruggedized computer products to fill that void.

Stealth Computer Corporation is continuing to grow from our basic root philosophy and is evolving as a leading provider of premium rugged computer systems and peripherals to a wide range of industrial, commercial and scientific users, worldwide. Stealth is an ISO 9001:2000 Certified Company.

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