SATA – Serial ATA

SATA stands for Serial AT Attachment or Serial ATA.  This interface is used to connect host computers to storage devices such as a hard drive or optical drives (CD & DVD).  SATA has become very popular because the controllers are integrated into most motherboards and laptop computers.

SATA is the next evolution of the ATA (or EIDE) interface that is so popular in personal computers.  In the past, Parallel ATA (or PATA) made up a major portion in the hard drive industry, but it suffers the same fate as all parallel interfaces: speed limitations and physical connectors.  As CPU speeds get faster, the IO (input-output) interface to storage becomes the bottleneck for performance in most computer systems. SATA has increased the speed of the interface while shrinking the number of connections needed between devices at the same time.  Speeds at this time are 1.5 Gb/s (Gigabits per second), 3.0 Gb/s, and 6.0 Gb/s.

A benefit if SATA is that it is compatible with SAS.  This allows SATA drives to installed in a high performance storage enclosure to provide extra capacity at a lower cost than SAS drives.  This type of arrangement will require the use of a SAS expander, but allows a system of “tiered storage” to be assembled in a single enclosure.  Note: SAS hard drives are normally higher performance but lower capacity than SATA hard drives.