Serial ATA
Lesson 8
In this lesson, we will be taking a look at what routes all the data inside your computer - the hard drive cable. Early on, it was all about IDE parallel cables. Nowadays, it is all about SATA. The format is so popular, even CD-ROMs use it. Basically, the motherboard in your computer connects everything together; everything in your computer connects to it in some way or another. The way hard drives, CD-ROM’s and floppy drives connect to it is with this new SATA cable.
Several years ago, when hard drives were still primarily using IDE ribbons, transferring data was slow, painful, and unreliable. There was a little sunshine when the IDE Parallel came out, boasting a 66 MB transfer rate (double what was currently in use). That had its run, but it wasn’t long before the next generation in data transfer became available - weighing in at a massive 1.5GB transfer rate, the first generation of SATA drastically changed peoples’ lives by increasing performance, productivity, and reducing stress for computer technicians. Much smaller than the ribbon it was replacing, SATA would reach speeds of 3GB transfer rate in its second generation (third generation numbers show a massive 6GB per second transfer rates). There were some fundamental differences in the design on the cable, but what it really did different was move data. Installing programs became faster, moving data between drives became faster, and software loading times decreased.
In the picture below you will see the difference between the old style IDE ribbons and SATA:
The SATA capable drive also uses a different power cable, replacing the old 4 pin one that had been used for decades with a much less power hungry model. Using just 3.3 volts instead of 5 and 12, its sleek, wider design even allowed hot plugging in some cases (plugging in a device while the computer was on). This is more a function for servers, but it’s pretty handy if you are working on a computer.
The main take away is that everything must connect to the motherboard, which connects everything to each other. For a long period of time, the bottle neck was in the cables that connected everything. Since the introduction of Serial ATA, that is no longer the case. It is important to know that cables come in all sorts of different colors and lengths, but inside they are all the same. Unfortunately, you can’t just use SATA cables wherever you like - the device has to be capable of handling it. Whenever you are looking for hardware to use in your computer, you will want to use SATA whenever possible.
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