What is SATA on the hard drive

Sata's full name is serial Advanced Technology attachment (Serial Advanced technology Attachment, an industry-standard serial Hardware driver interface), which is made up of Intel, IBM, Dell, APT, The hard disk interface specification proposed by Maxtor and Seagate Corporation. The Serial ATA 1.0 specification was formally established in 2001 by the Serial ATA Board of Intel, APT, Dell, IBM, Seagate, and the major vendors.

SATA support Hot-swappable, fast transmission, high performance using SATA (serial ATA) port hard drive is also called serial hard disk, is the future of PC hard drive trend. Serial ATA uses serial connection, the Serial ATA bus uses the embedded clock signal, has the stronger error correcting ability, compared to the past its biggest difference is can carry on the transmission instruction (not only the data) to examine, if discovers the error will automatically correct, this greatly enhances the data transmission reliability. The serial interface also has the advantages of simple structure and hot-swappable support.

Serial disk is a kind of new type of hard disk interface which is completely different from parallel ATA, which is well-known for transmitting data by serial way. Compared to parallel ATA, there are many advantages. First, the Serial ATA transmits data serially, and only 1 bits of data are transmitted at a time. This reduces the number of pins in the SATA connector, making the number of cables less and more efficient. In fact, serial ATA can do all of its work with only four pins, which are used to connect cables, connect ground wires, send data and receive data, and such architectures can reduce system energy consumption and reduce system complexity. Second, Serial ATA has a higher starting point and greater development potential, and Serial ATA 1.0 defines a data transmission rate of up to 150mb/s, which is higher than the maximum data transfer rate for 133mb/s by the fastest parallel ATA (i.e. ata/133), while Serial ATA 2.0 of the data transmission rate reached 300mb/s, the final SATA will achieve 600mb/s maximum data transmission rate.

Sata physical design, can be said to fibre Channel (Fibre Channel) as the blueprint, so the use of four-core wiring; the demand voltage is significantly reduced to 250mV (highest 500mV), compared to the traditional parallel ATA interface 5V 20 times times less! Therefore, manufacturers can give serial ATA hard drives are attached with advanced hard drive features, such as hot-swappable swapping. More importantly, in the form of connectivity, SATA also supports a "star" connection in addition to the traditional point-to-point (point-to-point) format, which can provide design convenience for advanced applications such as RAID, in which SATA host bus adapters (Hba,host Bus Adapter) is like a switch on the network, it can be in the form of channels and separate each hard disk communication, that is, each SATA hard disk exclusive One transmission channel, so there is no such as parallel ATA master/control problem.