Serial ATA what is it?

[rjshenal]

Hello:

Can anyone please tell the what the difference and advantages between parallel and serial ATA? I know it's kind of new and I've seen it advertised.

Thanks so Much
rjshenal

 

[vassil3427]

serial ATA is faster and the cables are smaller, so more convenient...

 

[rjshenal]

I was just wondering what the terms serial and parallel mean. Are the sata's drives connected in series and the ata's connected in parallel? Was just wondering.

Thanks for the quick response.

rjshenal

 

[StormBringer]

it means that the data is passed serially. Thats a bit of a quick and dirty answer but its the most simple way to explain it without getting into technical details that might confuse some. though I'm sure someone will come along behind me and give you a webopedia copy/paste explanation. so I'll save them the trouble:

Often abbreviated SATA or S-ATA, an evolution of the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA is a serial link -- a single cable with a minimum of four wires creates a point-to-point connection between devices. Transfer rates for Serial ATA begin at 150MBps. One of the main design advantages of Serial ATA is that the thinner serial cables facilitate more efficient airflow inside a form factor and also allow for smaller chassis designs. In contrast, IDE cables used in parallel ATA systems are bulkier than Serial ATA cables and can only extend to 40cm long, while Serial ATA cables can extend up to one meter.

Short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:
ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).
ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.
Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.
ATA/66: A version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that doubles ATA's throughput to 66 MBps.
ATA/100: An updated version of ATA/66 that increases data transfer rates to 100 MBps.
ATA also is called Parallel ATA. Contrast with Serial ATA.

 

[agissi]

Good post SB I knew what SATA was but that last quote was a good read to straiten facts out.

 

[Per Hansson]

Remeber though that the PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s

So even if that SATA controller might work at 150MB/s the limit will be the PCI bus...

The Intel ICH5 shoutbridge circumvents this by not being on the PCI bus... (it has it's own special bus...)

And it's quite usefull with high-end harddrives because we really are getting limited by the PCI bus as it is now...

Everything sits oin it, Soundcard, NIC's, Firewire, USB et etc etc...

And run two harddrives in RAID-0 and you sure will max that PCI bus... (one harddrive can actually sustain 80MB/s if it's a new one....)

Never mind the WD Raptor 10.000RPM harddrive...

 

[rjshenal]

Thanks everyone for all the good info
rjshenal

 

[jhmed]

I was going to post a new thread about this, but I think it might fall nicely into this user's already existing thread... not trying to intentionally jack a thread.

Is there any difference between SATA & SATAII. I have a SATA HD and I want to buy a new, larger HD but all I can find are SATAII drives. Will I have problems hooking up the SATAII drive?