ok what is SATA and what's the benefit of it?

Question

I know it's a new HDD interface, and obviously, it's got to be speedier than your normal IDE drive. What else is there to know?

Answer 1

Serial ATA - 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.

Answer 2

Sata (serial ATA) is the latest and greatest for hard drives. It has a bigger bus width so it can transfer data faster than a normal ata drive. There has been a lot of debate about whether you actually need the extra bandwidth. Most hard drives are limited by how fast they can seek to data and spin, and the bottleneck of the bus width is only seen when running the disks in a RAID configuration. I would say that you probably don't need the extra bus width unless you are running RAID, but SATA is so cheap, why not upgrade?

Answer 3

SATA is serial ATAPI. It's the latest harddrive interface. The interface is serial instead of parallel. It can operate with a faster bus clock since it is not limited by crosstalk.

In short its a faster harddrive.

Answer 4

Less expensive and typically faster drives.

Most people are amazed at how much a slow drive affects everything on their pc, including surfing the internet.

Get a 7200 or 10,000 rpm drive with 16mb buffer as your main drive and you will be amazed. Plus they can be huge for lots of storage. I just saw a 320gb for $80. Get 2, one for backups.