SATA

SATA or Serial ATA as popularly known is the next generation drive interface and ATA stands for Advanced Technology Advancement. This is an interface used to connect ATA hard drives to a computer’s mother board. SATA is known for its transfer rates which starts at 150MBps that is significantly faster that the other fastest 100MBps ATA/100 drives. Due to these reasons SATA is gaining popularity and said to replace the previous technology Parallel ATA that has been in use since 1980s.

Advantages over Parallel ATA

In addition to faster transfer rates this interface in several ways are superior to PATA interface. SATA drives possess their own independent bus hence there need not be competition for bandwidth as the case in Parallel ATA.  Further the cables they use are smaller and thinner so as to allow better airflow inside the computer. SATA cables are longer than PATA while the previous is about one meter the latter max out at 40cm therefore this is a privilege and freedom for the manufacturers when designing the internal layout of their computers. In addition to the above mentioned advantages SATA uses only 7 conductors while its counterpart uses 40 which means there is less likely to be electromagnetic interference with SATA devices.

The Serial ATA International Organization

It is the serial ATA International Organization which specifies the compatibility factors of Serial ATA.  This organization is responsible for creating, reviewing, ratifying and publishing the interoperability specifications, the test cases, and plug-fests.

The first generation SATA interfaces were communicating at a rate of 1.5Gbits hence it was called as SATA 1.5Gbit/s. the second generation interfaces were running at 3.0Gbit/s and shipping in high volumes of 2010 which is prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. By the year 2008 the international organization presented the SATA 6Gbits with ratified physical layer specification.

Certain features of SATA

The salient features of this interface include hotplugging for the devices and motherboards that meet the interoperability spec and Serial ATA  controllers use the Advanced Host Controller Interface permitting the advanced features of Serial ATA such as hotplugging and native command queuing. Windows device drivers that are tagged as SATA are often operating in IDE emulation mode unless they overtly state that they are AHCI mode, in RAID mode, or a mode offered by a proprietary driver and command set that was designed to permit access to SATA’s advanced characteristics before AHCI became famous.

Questions:

• What is SATA?
• State the role of SATA interfaces in present context.