S-ATA - Serial ATA

S-ATA is a standard connection HDD derived from ATA connections (E-IDE). The technology inside these hard drives is identical. For cons, the connection is no longer a ribbon cable (parallel connection of 40 or 80 pins) but by a cable type series containing 7 wires. The maximum (theoretical) is 150 MB / s (133 Mega byte for the fastest PATA). The first devices are from early 2003.

If serial connections had a reputation for being slow compared to parallell solutions, the current flow is limited by electromagnetic interference on the signal. This is also implemented in hyper-transport (bus inter-AMD) and DMI (Intel). The connector includes 7 wires, 3 for mass and 4 for communication (bi-directional differential with 2 channel - signal strength and signal inverted). It is equipped with a keyway. The feeding device is either a standard 4-pin connector or a 15 pin connector containing tensions 3.3V, 5V and 12 V. An adapter allows you to connect ATX power on these connectors. The SATA power connectors resume directly to this type.

Unlike the E-IDE, a single disk controller is connected. The bandwidth is not shared. The motherboards current generally include 2 connectors (4 on the most efficient) and allows the configuration RAID 0 (not recommended) or RAID 1 (security). Some cards accepted until RAID 10 (3 or 4 hard drives). There is no bypass to be set on FDI (master - slave). Serial ATA can be seen as a SCSI "Low Cost". It also includes some features such as hot plug (provided that the operating system accepts as Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Seven and 2003 and 2008) or error checking. This technology uses LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signaling), similar to LVD.

The connection on the motherboard does not pose too many problems. Stay detection device by Windows. Current versions of Windows does not support SATA natively eveyr time (it's depend of the motherboard chipset). This requires a specific driver, the connection can be done in practice than from Windows 2000 or XP. Some motherboards (generally low-quality) require a special disk to create using the CD-ROM provided on the installation CD of the motherboard. When starting Windows Setup, when proposing to load additional drivers, press F6. After loading the standard drivers, Windows will ask the diskette created earlier. Current motherboards typically allow direct recognition devices by emulating a standard ATA port. Capacity limits may also arise.

Even if the technology seems interesting, the transfer speed is limited by the construction of internal hard drives. The access time still limited level plateaus, the internal transfer rate caps for most common disk to 80 GB / s. In addition, the first controller using the PCI bus (limited to 133 MB / s for all devices). Currently, the SATA controller is integrated in the Southbridge of Chipset. The following standard (SATA2) released in 2005 doubles the theoric transfer rate to 300 MB/s.

Related: IDE - SAS (SATA dedicaced for server) - SMART (BIOS)