What Is a Serial ATA Hard Drive?

Serial ATA hard drives have multiple advantages over ATA drives. These include better cabling management, elimination of jumper cables to set master/slave configurations for two drives, lower power consumption and higher transfer rates.

History

Serial ATA (SATA) drives began to replace older ATA drives in order to get beyond the 133 MBs data transfer rate limit. SATA hard drives with transfer rates up to 150 MBs came on the market in 2003.

Function

Serial ATA hard drives allow faster access times, which became very important as the storage capacities of hard drives increased significantly over a few years.

Features

SATA hard drives can be hot-swapped--that is, connected or disconnected without turning off the power--a particular advantage in notebook computers. Reduced cable size increases airflow in the PC.

Identification

The wide ribbon cables used with ATA drives are replaced with thin SATA cables. The SATA hard drive itself is labeled on the case, and the data connection has seven instead of 40 ATA pins.

Warning

Older hard drives may not be able to keep up with the faster transfer rates found with the Serial ATA connection specification.