SATA vs ATA Interfaces.

SATA to IDE drives. 

SATA vs ATAinterfaces are a comparison that you must understand before buying your drives.

When you are talking about computer systems performance and its constant development, you always mention the faster processors, memory and video card. An important component that you often forget is the hard drive.

During the last few years there have been some significant developments in hard drive manufacturing as larger caches, faster spindle speeds, greater reliability and enlarged speed of data transmission.

The drive that you most often used is the ATA type drive. Its standard relies on 16-bit parallel interface. Since its first appearance it had suffered many developments in order to obtain greater speed and capacity of the drives it supports. The most recent one is ATA-7 supporting data transfer rates up to 133 MB/sec. There will be probably no more updates to this standard.

In 2000 it was realized that the parallel ATA standard had exceeded its resources. The data rates had reached 133 MB/sec and many problems began to appear due to signal timing, electromagnetic interference and others related to data integrity.

That is why, the industry leaders gathered and created a new different standard called Serial ATA (SATA). It seems that SATA is going to become the new “standard” because of the advantages it offers.

The two technologies that will be dealt with below are ATA versus SATA. ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) is a 16-bit parallel interface. It controls your computer drives and has suffered many changes. Its most recent evolution is ATA-7.

The ATA device is usually parallel. The other popular names for ATA are IDE, or EIDE, Ultra-ATA, or Ultra-DMA, ATAPI, or PATA, all of them reflecting something specific. Yet, they are often interchanged. SATA (Serial Advances Technology Attachment) is a 1-bit serial improvement of the storage interfaces of Parallel ATA (PATA).

SATA drives stand out from ATA ones by the different data and power connections situated on the back of the drives. If you buy one of the various contemporary motherboards you’ll find them with SATA drive connection onboard.

If you have older systems you can also upgrade it for SATA drives usage via adapter. There are already optical drives with SATA connections as well.

SATA drives are easier to install and use less power. Another advantage is their performance which makes a great difference. With SATA you have the maximum bandwidth possible. In contrast to ATA (where the maximum possible transfer rate is 133 MB/sec), SATA standard offers data transfers of up to 150 MB/second.

Drives with 300 MB/sec transfer rates (SATA II) are already on the market and, as inconceivably as it may sound, the speeds will probably reach 600 MB/sec this year.

SATA drives have another advantageous feature as well. They can be brought on and offline without turning your computer system down. Thus downtime will be avoided and drives could be moved in and out of work quickly. This “hot-swap” feature is the reason for the six of the fifteen wires in the power connection.

SATA drives are a little more expensive that ATA or IDE ones. Bearing in mind their advantages, however, this little difference in the price can be quickly neglected when you opt for an upgrade.

Sooner or later SATA standard will certainly oust the ATA one from its place since it surpasses ATA in every respect – power consumption, convenience and performance.

The increase of speed will enhance the development of hard drive and in the future it will not be behind the other system components any more. It is the main reason you really have to know sufficiently the interfaces features to better compare SATA vs ATA.