SATA - An Overview Of the Latest Hard Drive Technology
SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a type of computer storage connection technology (also known as a bus). It was designed to replace the very old ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) storage device technology that had been popular on home computers for many years. ATA was a form of slower parallel bus and SATA (with it's much faster serial bus) was designed to replace it and take home computers to new highs of data transfer rates.
SATA comes in 2 basic flavours with a third to come in the very near future (SATA 6.0)
SATA 1.5 - transferred data at 1.5gigabits per second (150MB per second). Only marginally faster than existing ATA/133 drives.
SATA 3.0 - the doubled data transfer rate of 3.0 gigabits per second (300MB per second) has taken current hard drives to their speed limits. This is the fastest incarnation of SATA until 6.0 becomes available.
Most current desktop PCs use SATA drives and in time they will fully replace the old IDE/ATA standard.