What is a SATA Hard Drive?

The SATA hard drive is the newest storage interface for the PC. It was designed to replace the IDE/ATA interface. To avoid confusion, IDE/ATA has been renamed as IDE/PATA to distinguish it from the newer serial interface. (The “s” in SATA stands for “serial” and the “p” in PATA stands for “parallel.”)

The SATA standard was created in 2003 to solve several problems. The primary problem was the Ultra ATA/133 speed bottleneck. Currently, the latest SATA drives are capable of 300 MB/sec. A second problem solved by SATA is that the thinner cables improve airflow inside the case. Improved airflow helps to prevent overheating.

The internal SATA 7-pin connectors and cables are orange in color. Each SATA drive is directly connected to the controller and is not required to share a bus with another hard drive. To make it easier to route SATA cables inside a large case, the standard allows the cable to be up to 3 feet long.

Most motherboards sold today will have SATA controllers. If your motherboard does not support SATA, you can purchase a PCI SATA controller card. If your computer doesn’t have a SATA controller, then it’s also likely that your power supply doesn’t support the new 15-pin SATA power connector. If this is so, you can purchase a plug converter to convert the 4-pin Molex to the 15-pin SATA power connector.

The eSATA standard is an effort to allow SATA to compete in the external storage market. This standard extends the SATA cable length to 6 feet and provides better connectors. This is especially useful if you want to build an external RAID at a minimal cost.

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