SATA Cable

Sata’s physical design can be said to be based on Fibre Channel, so four-core wiring is used; the required voltage is drastically reduced to 250 mv (up to 500 mv) , which is 20 times less than the 5v of a traditional parallel ATA interface! As a result, vendors can attach advanced hard disk features to Serial ATA drives, such as Hot Swapping.

More importantly, in addition to the traditional Point-to-Point form of connectivity, SATA supports”Star” connectivity, making it easier to design for advanced applications like RAID In practical use, Sata’s Host Bus Adapter (HBA) acts like a switch on a network, communicating with each hard disk individually as a channel, that is, each SATA hard disk has an exclusive transport channel, so there is no master/slave control problem like a parallel ATA.

The Serial ATA specification is not only based on the future, but also preserves a variety of backward-compatible ways in which it can be used without problems of compatibility. On the hardware side, the Serial ATA standard allows for the use of converters to provide compatibility with parallel ATA devices that convert parallel ATA signals from the motherboard into Serial signals that Serial ATA drives can use, a number of such adapter cards/adapters are already available, which somewhat protects our original investment and reduces upgrade costs; on the software side, Serial ATA and parallel ATA maintain software compatibility, this means that the vendor does not have to rewrite any driver and operating system code to use Serial ATA at all.

In addition, Serial ATA wiring is much simpler than the traditional parallel Ata (Paralle Ata) wiring, and easy to retract, the air flow and heat dissipation in the chassis has been significantly improved. In addition, Sata hard drive is different from the parallel ATA, which is always trapped in the chassis. It is very expandable, that is, it can be external. The external cabinet (JBOD) can not only provide better heat dissipation and plug-in functions, and multiple connections can be made to prevent a single point of failure; because SATA and fiber-optic channels are designed in the same way, the transmission speed can be guaranteed by different channels, this has important implications for servers and network storage. Serial Ata has many advantages over parallel ATA and will be a cheap alternative to parallel ATA. And it’s only a matter of time before the transition from parallel ATA to Serial ATA is inevitable. SATA interfaces are also being promoted by vendors, such as Intel’s ICH6 family of Southbridge

Compared with the ICH5 series of southbridge chips, the number of SATA interfaces increased from 2 to 4, while the number of parallel ATA interfaces decreased from 2 to 1 NVIDIA’s nForce4 series chipset already supports SATA II, or Serial ATA 2.0, and Samsung has used Marvell 88i6525 SOC chips to develop a new generation of SATA II interface hard drives, which will be available in early 2005. 2007

SATA2 and SATA2.5 standards were established in 1998, and the speed of SATA2 and SATA2.5 reached 300MB/s.