Serial ATA?

dstranathan

1) Can someone explain this new technology in a) An overview or b) In detail?



2) How is it better than ATA?



3) For some reason when I hear the word "serial" I think LEGACY. Please enlighten me.



4) No question. I just like to count! :0/



Yes, I have been to Google. It is my friend. However I would like to hear your perspective on it. It may be a good thing for us Mac heads to discuss it. You never know, SATA just may show up in your next Mac soon...

eugene

2) Serial ATA is out right now at 150 MB/s, but it's going to scale up to several times that. It has a simpler connector, with fewer pins.



3) FireWire and USB 2.0 are both serial connections. Generally, you can distinguish serial connections with parallel connections by counting pins. SCSI, Parallel..a fucton of pins. FireWire and Serial ATA...a handful of pins. FireWire was originally brainstormed as a serial SCSI replacement.

mcq

As for detail, Extremetech gives a little detail on it:



<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,813269,00.asp"; target="_blank">http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,813269,00.asp</a>;



They have a review on some Seagate drive on their site somewhere, and alternatively Anandtech has a review of a pre-production WD 10,000 rpm SATA drive. Both reviews found that SATA offers no advantage right now since most drives don't come anywhere close to the 150 MB/s theroretical throughput provided by SATA.