It was an awfully long wait. We were expecting them at the end of the summer, but it has dragged on through the winter. First Fujitsu sent us pre-production samples of their 2.5-inch Serial ATA laptop drive. Now, the first (desktop) drive has reached us -- the Barracuda ATA V from Seagate.

Tests with pre-production models (from Western Digital, among others) soon took the wind out of the sails of any overly ambitious expectations we might have had about this new interface. The Serial ATA interface promises to deliver up to 150 Mbps. 300 and 600 Mbps are planned for the future. However, these figures refer to the maximum transfer rate that the interface can deliver to the system. The actual transfer rate depends, as always, on the drive itself. Not only that, but the controller also has a considerable influence on transfer performance, which is why we have included five of the latest adapter cards in our review: the RocketRAID 1520 and 1540 from HighPoint; the Promise SATA 150 TX2 and TX4 (with two and four ports, respectively); and the Escalade 8500-8 from 3Ware, which is capable of handling up to eight Serial ATA drives.