Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
Short for Serial ATA, a hard drive communication standard that uses serial communication instead of parallel. This standard transfers data at 1.5 Gbps (150 MB/s). A second version reaches 3 Gbps (300 MB/s). Another advantage of SATA-II is a feature called “native command queuing” that sorts read commands sent by the PC in order to put them in the best order to make it faster to read data from the disk.
Only one hard drive can be connected to each Serial ATA port.
It is important to notice that there are two ways of building Serial ATA ports and hard disk drives. The port can be Serial ATA natively or can be a parallel port using a Serial ATA converting chip (the most common one is Marvell 88i8030). The same occurs with Serial ATA hard disk drives, which can be natively Serial ATA or can be parallel hard drives using a Serial ATA converting chip on its logic board.
Serial ATA drives are hot swap, allowing them to be changed with the computer turned on. But for that it is necessary that you use a Serial ATA power connector, which is different from the standard hard disk drive power connector.
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Figure 1: Motherboard with two Serial ATA ports (in red).
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Figure 2: Serial ATA hard disk drive.
