Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Photo 1.16
Power and data connectors at the rear of two hard drives
The next generation of hard drives are set to use the newly introduced Serial
ATA (SATA) interface which is now becoming widely available. Existing par-
allel ATA drives transfer data concurrently on multiple parallel wires within an
80-wire cable. In contrast, SATA drives transfer data at high speeds over a thin
7-wire cable.
Serial ATA drives offer several advantages over IDE drives, not the least of
which is speed. The maximum data transfer rate (or burst rate) for most parallel
drives is between 100 and 133 MB/s whilst drives using the first generation of
the SATA interface can often reach 150 MBps. SATA drive speeds are expected
to increase significantly over the next few years.
