SATA

SATA

Serial ATA(SATA) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and also optical drives. It has also reduced cable size and cost by having 7 conductors instead of 40 or 80,native hot swapping, faster data transfer through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O queuing protocol by succeeding the older parallel ATA (PATA). SATA host adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable over two pairs of conductors. The parallel ATA used a 16-bit wide data bus with many additional support and control signals, all operating at a much lower frequency. In order to ensure backward compatibility with legacy ATA software and applications, SATA uses the same basic ATA and ATAPI command sets as legacy ATA devices.