what is SATA and PATA harddisk?

Answer 1

SATA is the newer Serial ATA drive interface. Inside the box, these are connected with thinner cables that are easy to manage.

PATA is the older so-called Parallel ATA drive interface. Before SATA came out, these were known only as ATA drives. Inside the box, these were wide ribbon cables. Inside some boxes, they are a bit short for where they have to go, and are difficult to twist around to get plugged in properly.

While it is ABOUT TIME that the SATA drives came out, so many many many computers came with the older ATA drives. Should you have to replace your hard drive in an older computer, MAKE SURE that you get the proper ATA drive. SATA will absolutely NOT work on an older machine that accepts PATA.

Answer 2

SATA is Serial ATA where as PATA is Parallel ATA, (or the regular EIDE, IDE, ATA # drives that connect with 40pin cables).

SATA comes in 2 types SATA I, which can theoretically transfer data at 1.5gb and SATA II, which doubles that to 3.0gb.

PATA now normally comes in 33/66/100/133 flavors each respresenting thoroughput 33mb/66mb/1gb/1.33gb.

Right now, most systems struggle to actually reach somewhere between 60 and 90mb of sustained thoroughput, so in reality, unless you work with unusually large files (250mb or bigger) choosing one or the other over another, SATA or PATA, won't make much difference in your performance.

If you're building a system, though, it doesn't hurt to future-proof yourself by getting a motherboard that supports SATAII since the drives don't cost much more than regular SATA I or PATA drives and the motherboards can be had for as little as 50 USD with both types of drives supported.

Answer 3

They are 2 different type of hard drives

SATA = Serial ATA hard drive - which is newer and faster than the older PATA hard drives
PATA = Parrallel ATA Hard drive - send data to and from hard drive via a ribbon cable

Answer 4

Linkage answers all.
SATA is Serial data transfer, PATA is Parallel Data Transfer.

If designed appropriately, Parallel is theoretically faster to use, but at higher levels becomes much more expensive to implement.

Answer 5

SATA is Serial ATA it is a new fast HDD connection that i would personaly reccomend, the next generation of computers all have them it looks like this
_______
| ==== | ( i with a line underneath it ) the middle looks like a firewire middle

PATA is Paralell ATA is the old in line cable that looks like this
|::::::::::::..::::::::::::|
it is bigger but yahoo blocked it lol
The pic was cut off without This

Answer 6

Just go to the link
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_11_22/ai_98977132
or else contact me at my email Id

Answer 7

Serial ATA
A serial version of the ATA (IDE) interface, which has been parallel since its inception in 1986. Ratified by ANSI in 2002 as the next-generation ATA technology, Serial ATA (SATA) provides a point-to-point channel between motherboard and drive rather than the Parallel ATA (PATA) master-slave architecture that supports two drives on the same cable.

Serial ATA (SATA) transfers data in a half-duplex channel at 1.5 Gbps in one direction. With SATA II, introduced in 2003, speed was increased to 3 Gbps.


Smaller Cables and Connectors

SATA uses a four-wire cable up to one meter in length compared to the 18" wide, flat cable used with PATA drives. The cables and connectors are considerably smaller than their PATA counterpart and take up a lot less space in the case.


PATA
(Parallel ATA) Refers to the original ATA (IDE) technology that uses a parallel data channel from the controller to the disk drives. After Serial ATA drives became popular, the PATA term was coined to specifically refer to the parallel drives.


In computer hardware, Serial ATA (SATA, IPA: /ˈsata/ or /ˈseiˌtə/) is a computer bus technology primarily designed for transfer of data to and from a hard disk. It is the successor to the legacy Advanced Technology Attachment standard (ATA, also known as IDE). This older technology was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA) to distinguish it from Serial ATA.

SATA
First-generation Serial ATA interfaces, also known as SATA/150, run at 1.5 gigahertz (GHz). Serial ATA uses 8B/10B encoding at the physical layer. This encoding scheme has an efficiency of 80%, resulting in an actual data transfer rate of 1.2 gigabits per second (Gb/s), or 150 megabytes per second (MB/s). The relative simplicity of a serial link and the use of LVDS allow both the use of longer drive cables and an easier transition path to higher speeds.

SATA 3Gb/s
With the release of the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset in 2004, the clock rate was doubled to 3.0 GHz, for a maximum throughput of 300 MB/s. SATA 3Gb/s is backward compatible with SATA 1.2Gb/s, allowing SATA 1.2Gb/s hardware to interface with SATA 3Gb/s ports and vice versa. However, some systems that do not support SATA speed autonegotiation may require that the drive's speed be manually limited to 150 MB/s with the use of a jumper for a 300 MB/s drive.[1]

The 3.0 GHz specification has been very widely referred to as “Serial ATA II” (“SATA II”), contrary to the wishes of the Serial ATA standards organization that authored it. The official website notes that SATA II was in fact that organization's name at the time, the SATA 3Gb/s specification being only one of many that the former SATA II defined, and suggests that “SATA 3Gb/s” be used instead. (The Serial ATA standards organization has since changed names, and is now “The Serial ATA International Organization”, abbreviated SATA-IO.)

SATA-IO plans to further increase the maximum throughput of Serial ATA to 600 MB/s around the year 2007.

SATA 3Gb/s is also sometimes referred to as SATA/300, continuing the line of PATA/100, PATA/133 and SATA/150.

Serial ATA innovations

A 7-pin Serial ATA data cable.
A 15-pin Serial ATA power connector.Physically, the cables used display the most noticeable change from Parallel ATA. The SATA standard defines a data cable using seven conductors and 8 mm wide wafer connectors on each end. SATA cables can be up to 1 m (39 in) long. PATA ribbon cables, in comparison, carry either 40- or 80-conductor wires and are limited to 46 cm (18 in) in length. The reduction in conductors makes SATA connectors and cables much narrower than those of PATA, thus making them more convenient to route within tight spaces and reducing obstructions to air cooling. Unlike early PATA connectors, SATA connectors are keyed — it is not possible to install cable connectors upside down without considerable force.

SATA drops the master/slave shared bus of PATA, giving each device a dedicated cable and dedicated bandwidth. While this requires twice the number of host controllers to support the same number of SATA devices, at the time of SATA's introduction this was no longer a significant drawback. Another controller could be added into a controller ASIC at little cost beyond the addition of the extra seven signal lines and printed circuit board (PCB) space for the cable header.

The SATA standard also specifies a power connector sharply differing from the four-pin Molex connector used by PATA drives and many other computer components. Like the data cable, it is wafer-based, but its wider 15-pin shape should prevent confusion between the two. The seemingly large number of pins are used to supply three different voltages if necessary — 3.3 V, 5 V, and 12 V. Each voltage is supplied by three pins ganged together (and 5 pins for ground). This is because the small pins cannot supply sufficient current for some devices, so they are combined. One pin from each of the three voltages is also used for hotplugging. The same physical connections are used on 3.5-in (90mm) and 2.5-in (70mm) (notebook) hard disks. Some SATA drives include in PATA style four-pin Molex connector for use with power supplies that lack the SATA power connector. Also, adaptors plugs are available to convert a PATA style power connector to SATA power connector.

Features allowed for by SATA but not by PATA include hot-swapping and native command queueing.

To ease their transition to SATA, many manufacturers have produced drives which use controllers largely identical to those on their PATA drives and include a bridge chip on the logic board. Bridged drives have a SATA connector, may include either or both kinds of power connectors, and generally perform identically to native drives. They may, however, lack support for some SATA-specific features. As of 2004, all major hard drive manufacturers produce either bridged or native SATA drives.

SATA drives may be plugged into Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) controllers and communicate on the same physical cable as native SAS disks. SAS disks, however, may not be plugged into a SATA controller.

External SATA
Initially SATA was designed as an internal or inside-the-box interface technology, bringing improved performance and new features to internal PC or consumer storage. Designers quickly realized the new interface could reliably be expanded outside the PC, bringing the same performance and features to external storage needs instead of relying on USB or FireWire (IEEE 1394) interfaces. Called external SATA or eSATA, the SATA devices can be plugged by shielded cable lengths up to two meters outside the PC. SATA is now out of the box as an external standard, with specifically defined cables, connectors, and signal requirements released as new standards in mid-2004. eSATA provides more performance than existing solutions and is hot pluggable.