How Are SATA Drives SuperiorSATA
Hard drives are fast, robust data storage devices. Unlike other obsolete technologies, SATA drives also provide other features that home users can benefit from.
The Acronym SATA stands for "Serial Advanced Technology Attachment," and is essentially a transportation system for data to and from a computer hard drive. Older types of hard drives use transport systems (also known as a "bus") that go by names such as Parallel ATA (PATA) and SCSI.
While SCSI is still being used in modern computer systems PATA has all but moved into obsolescence due to the super speed and capabilities of the SATA bus. This article will review the benefits of SATA hard drives over other types and also discusses how SATA cables differ from PATA and SCSI.
Hard Drive Speed Versus SATA Bus Speed
There are several things that go into determining the overall speed of an SATA hard drive. One of these is the speed of the SATA bus, which is currently limited by specification to 300MB/sec. This is more than enough bandwidth for almost any existing application, and far more than the now obsolete PATA specification.
As hard drive technologies continue to advance and as computers begin to provide more and more rich media content such as high definition video and complex video games this limit is already becoming a road block.
The second variable that figures in to the overall speed and performance of an SATA hard drive is the speed of the storage drive itself and how fast it can potentially push the data down the bus to the computer's processor and memory.
Advanced flash memory based hard drives will potentially be maxing out this 300MB cap in the near future, so a new version of SATA is now in the pipeline. The new version of the SATA standard (known as SATA 6) will be able to push data at twice the speed of the old version of SATA, and reports are that it should arrive in consumer products beginning in 2009.
What Are The Benefits of SATA Over Other Technologies?
Although speed is the primary benefit of using an SATA hard drive, other aspects of the SATA standard also bode very well for improved types of solid state SATA drives. Faster, larger capacity flash thumb drives can connect via the external SATA (eSATA) port that is now being built into many new computer systems.
In addition to the flexibility of eSATA drives another positive aspect of the SATA specification is the ease of use of the SATA cable and connectors. Old style PATA and SCSI cables are flat ribbon cables that are difficult to handle, block air flow inside the computer case, and have the connectors easily damaged or the pins bent if not carefully inserted.
SATA hard drives are now the current standard for almost all consumer brand computers. They are more than adequate for most home users and the backward compatibility built into the SATA specification means that any future upgrades to the specification will continue to work with existing SATA hard drives.
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