Serial ATA

Serial ATA

Serial ATA is a disk-interface technology developed by a group of the industry's leading vendors to replace parallel ATA. It is the natural successor to IDE. Serial ATA only requires seven wires per device (4 data and 3 ground) and the cables can be up to 1m long.

SATA I (the first version of SATA) supports data transfer speeds of up to 150mbps. SATA II supports data transfer speeds of up to 300mbps. Whilst the SATA interface supports these transfer rates it does not mean that the disk drive is capable of reading/writing at that rate. SATA also supports hot-swap of devices.

For more information see:

• www.serialata.org - SerialATA.org website.
• www.serialata.org/satatechnology.asp - Technical overview.