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What is Serial ATA?
Serial ATA is an enhancement to the ATA standard for for connecting storage to PC's.
All versions of ATA up until ATA-7 in 2004 utilized parallel transfer of data from the motherboard to the drive controller built onto the disk.
The ATA-7 specification introduced Serial ATA.
Serial ATA Standards
The original Serial ATA standard offered miniminal improvement over the existing 133MBps bandwidth of the existing Parallel ATA standard.
Serial ATA standards are constantly evolving to meet higher bandwidth requirements.
Serial ATA Type Bandwith Bus Speed Signal Rate SATA-150 150MBps 1500MHz 1.5Gbps SATA-300 300MBps 3000MHz 3.0Gbps SATA-600 600MBps 6000MHz 6.0Gbps
Serial ATA Data Cables
Higher bandwidth requirements were pushing requirements for shorter Parallel ATA data cables. Serial ATA reversed this trend by allowing data cables up to 1 meter in length.
eSATA (External SATA) allows the use of shielded cables up to 2 meters in length for external drives.
Serial ATA Power Cables
The serial ATA power cable uses a 15-pin wafer connector to provide 3.3, 5, or 12 volts to ATA devices.
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