From mini-ITX to nano-ITX

[Floid]

I've always thought a cool firewire device would be a 5 1/4 inch bay mounted break-out box with USB, ethernet, legacy ports (including PS/2) and maybe even SCSI/IDE. It'd be a good way to shrink any future motherboard.

After thinking about that for a minute... You're right.  SATA and SAS end up competing with/killing Firewire for bandwidth, but you could make the same thing for SAS pretty easily anyway.  Either way, then the drive cables don't have to be millions of miles long...

Of course, a standard backplane does the same thing conceptually ('CPU' module only needs to support one connector), and is probably cheaper to manufacture, but they still haven't caught on.  Getting the cables out of the way has implications for cooling but SATA/SAS mean those are tiny wires anyway.

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Anyhow, back on topic... Technically, they'd do better a little narrower and longer (given existing designs for removable bay sleds), but this does have some implications by making standard drive enclosures perhaps suitable for clusters of 'blades.'

Now if they fit in 3.5" sleds and could abuse SCA backplanes and power for their own inter-device communication, *that'd* be a product, and some nice recycling/lowered TCO.  Until datacenter monkeys start plugging drives into cluster cases and frying servers, anyway.

[Floid]

Do a google search on "USB to serial" and you'll find an ad ontop which sells USB to serial converters for 19$.

I'm sure you can find it a lot cheaper elsewhere, so please let the rest of us get rid of the legacy stuff

Mm, religion.  Point is that on the regular ITX board, there's still enough room, and they come along 'free,' especially if the 686B is your best option for reasons of price/availability/compatibility.  So no reason to ditch unless you can find something else to use up the space.

(Note that the current layout doesn't leave much room for the Cardbus promised, given the CPU riser; they *could* start sacrificing ports on the backplane for it, but that doesn't seem a very useful tradeoff.  Today's state of mind has me thinking they'll just offer a bridge on a PCI card/riser.)

Now, if there was something really worth cramming in instead, or you go down to an even-smaller form factor, sure, shave 'em if you have to, they won't be *too* sorely missed and the workarounds (USB->whatever bridges) are available.

Sort of like arguing column-shifters vs. floor-shifters on cars, here.  Do what fits the design.

BTW the A-One / Mini A-One doesn't have the 12x faster USB 2.0 that this puppy has, right ?

Which puppy?  It's not on earlier models, but it's been promised for the Lite.  Hard to say if it exists on the prototype, since we can't be sure we've seen every chip that lurks immediately behind the ports.