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The 
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computer bus, is a storage-interface for connecting host

bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives.

Serial ATA was designed to replace the older ATA (AT Attachment) standard (also
known as EIDE).

It is able to use the same low level commands, but serial ATA host-adapters and
devices communicate via a high-speed serial cable over two pairs of conductors.

In contrast, the parallel ATA used 16 data conductors each operating at a much
lower speed.
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SATA offers several compelling advantages over the older parallel ATA (PATA)
interface:

reduced cable-bulk and cost (reduced from 80 wires to seven),

faster and more efficient data transfer, and

hot swapping.

PATA remains in industrial and embedded applications dependent on Compact Flash

storage although the new CFast storage standard will be based on SATA.
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All SATA devices support hot plugging. However, proper hotplug support requires
the device be running in its native command mode not via IDE emulation, which
requires AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface).

Some of the earliest SATA host adapters were not capable of this and furthermore
some older operating systems, such as Windows XP, do not directly support AHCI.

 
 
 

As their standard interface, SATA controllers use the AHCI (Advanced Host
Controller Interface), allowing advanced features of SATA such as hot plug and
native command queuing (NCQ).

If AHCI is not enabled by the motherboard and chipset, SATA controllers typically
operate in "IDE emulation" mode which does not allow features of devices to be
accessed if the ATA/IDE standard does not support them.

Windows device drivers that are labeled as SATA are usually running in IDE
emulation mode unless they explicitly state that they are AHCI mode or in RAID
mode.
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While the drivers included with Windows XP do not support AHCI, AHCI has been
implemented by proprietary device drivers.

Windows Vista, Windows 7, FreeBSD, Linux with kernel version 2.6.19 onward,[as
well as Solaris and Open Solaris have native support for AHCI.

 
The current SATA specifications detail data transfer rates as high as 6.0 Gbit/s per
device.

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First-generation SATA interfaces, now known as SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, communicate at a
rate of 1.5 Gbit/s.

Taking 8b/10b encoding overhead into account, they have an actual uncoded
transfer rate of 1.2 Gbit/s (~143 MB/s).

The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s is similar to that of PATA/133,
but newer SATA devices offer enhancements such as NCQ which improve
performance in a multitasking environment.

Mechanical hard disk drives can transfer data at up to 131 MB/s, which is within the
capabilities of the older PATA/133 specification. However, high-performance flash
drives can transfer data at up to 201 MB/s, exceeding the specification.
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During the initial period after SATA 1.5 Gbit/s finalization, adapter and drive
manufacturers used a "bridge chip" to convert existing PATA designs for use with
the SATA interface.

Bridged drives have a SATA connector, may include either or both kinds of power
connectors, and generally perform identically to their PATA equivalents.

Most lack support for some SATA-specific features such as NCQ. Bridged products
gradually gave way to native SATA products.

Soon after the introduction of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, a number of shortcomings emerged.

At the application level many early SATA host bus adapters could handle only one
pending transaction at a time like PATA host bus adapters because they were only
capable of operating in IDE emulation mode due to the lack of a standardized
interface to utilize SATA's advanced features like native command queuing, which
allows drives to reorder commands without creating much CPU utilization, and hot-
plugging support.
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This forced vendors to either develop proprietary solutions and drivers to expose
these features, or to omit implementing these features and have the host bus
adapter look like a parallel ATA host bus adapter to the operating system.

Further compounding this problem was the fact that drives using bridge chips to
interface the SATA bus to a PATA drive could not use native command queuing and
therefore could only offer the legacy parallel ATA version of tagged command
queuing, which drove CPU utilization to impractical levels due to its need to remain
software compatibility with its ISA heritage, causing it to be nearly worthless and
therefore was almost never implemented.

The host bus adapter side of the problem was solved by the introduction of AHCI,
which allowed OS vendors to develop a standardized driver for any compliant AHCI
SATA host bus adapter to expose these advanced features.
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First-generation SATA devices often operated at best a little faster than parallel
ATA/133 devices.

Subsequently, a 3 Gbit/s signaling rate was added to the physical layer (PHY layer),
effectively doubling maximum data throughput from 150 MB/s to 300 MB/s.

For mechanical hard drives, SATA 3 Gbit/s transfer rate is expected to satisfy drive
throughput requirements for some time, as the fastest mechanical drives barely
saturate a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s link.

A SATA data cable rated for 1.5 Gbit/s will handle current mechanical drives without
any loss of sustained and burst data transfer performance. However, high-
performance flash drives are approaching SATA 3 Gbit/s transfer rate.

Given the importance of backward compatibility between SATA 1.5 Gbit/s

controllers and SATA 3 Gbit/s devices, SATA 3 Gbit/s autonegotiation sequence is
designed to fall back to SATA 1.5 Gbit/s speed when in communication with such
devices.

In practice, some older SATA controllers do not properly implement SATA speed
negotiation. Affected systems require the user to set the SATA 3 Gbit/s peripherals
to 1.5 Gbit/s mode, generally through the use of a jumper, however some drives
lack this jumper.
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Popular usage refers to the SATA 3 Gbit/s specification as Serial ATA II (SATA II or
SATA2), contrary to the wishes of the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-
IO) which defines the standard. SATA II was originally the name of a committee
defining updated SATA standards, of which the 3 Gbit/s standard was just one.
However since it was among the most prominent features defined by the former
SATA II committee, and, more critically, the term "II" is commonly used for
successors, the name SATA II became synonymous with the 3 Gbit/s standard, so
the group has since changed names to the Serial ATA International Organization
(SATA-IO) to avoid further confusion.
As of 2009, "SATA II" and "SATA 2" are the most common marketing terms for any
"second-generation" SATA drives, controllers or related accessories. Unfortunately,
these terms have no specific meaning, since they are not the proper official
nomenclature. Also, the second-generation SATA standards only define a set of
optional features (3 Gb/s, NCQ ƌ Native Command Queuing, staggered spin-up
and hot-plugging) improving on the first generation technology, but don't require
including those features. Almost any SATA product with any set of features could
legitimately be described as "compatible" with these standards. Only careful
research can determine which features may be included in any particular "SATA II"
product. [11] [12]
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In order to avoid parallels to the common SATA II misnomer, the SATA-IO has
compiled a set of marketing guidelines for the third revision of the specification.
The specification should be called Serial ATA International Organization: Serial ATA
Revision 3.0, and the technology itself is to be referred to as SATA 6Gb/s. A product
using this standard should be called the SATA 6Gb/s [product name]. The terms
SATA III or SATA 3.0, which are considered to cause confusion among consumers,
must not be used.[13]
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Serial ATA International Organization presented the draft specification of SATA 6
Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008,[14] and ratified its physical layer specification on
August 18, 2008.[15] The full 3.0 standard (maximum theoretical throughput about
750MB/s (6000/8, 8 bits to one byte, without the protocol, or encoding overhead)
was released on May 27, 2009.[16] While even the fastest conventional hard disk
drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid State Disk
drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 250 MB/s net read speed.
Ten channels of fast flash can reach well over 500 MB/s with new ONFI drives, so a
move from SATA 3 Gbit/s to SATA 6 Gbit/s would benefit the flash read speeds. As
for the standard hard disks, the reads from their built-in DRAM cache will end up
faster across the new interface.[17] Seagate was the first company to offer SATA 6
Gbit/s hard drives. [18]
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The new specification contains the following changes:

A new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command to enable Isochronous
data transfers for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications.

An NCQ Management feature that helps optimize performance by enabling host

processing and management of outstanding NCQ commands.
Improved power management capabilities.

A small Low Insertion Force (LIF) connector for more compact 1.8-inch storage
devices.

A connector designed to accommodate 7 mm optical disk drives for thinner and

lighter notebooks.

Alignment with the INCITS ATA8-ACS standard.

The enhancements are generally aimed at improving quality of service for video
streaming and high priority interrupts. In addition, the standard continues to
support distances up to a meter. The new speeds may require higher power
consumption for supporting chips, factors that new process technologies and power
management techniques are expected to mitigate. The new specification can use
existing SATA cables and connectors, although some OEMs are expected to
upgrade host connectors for the higher speeds.[19] Also, the new standard is
backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gbit/s.[20]
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Standardized in 2004, eSATA provides a variant of SATA meant for external
connectivity.

It has revised electrical requirements in addition to incompatible cables and

connectors:

Minimum transmit potential increased: Range is 500Ƌ600 mV instead of 400Ƌ

600 mV.

Minimum receive potential decreased: Range is 240Ƌ600 mV instead of 325Ƌ

600 mV.

Identical protocol and logical signaling (link/transport-layer and above), allowing

native SATA devices to be deployed in external enclosures with minimal
modification

Maximum cable length of 2 metres (6.6 ft) (USB and FireWire allow longer
distances.)
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The external cable connector equates to a shielded version of the connector

specified in SATA 1.0a with these basic differences:

The external connector has no "L" shaped key, and the guide features are
vertically offset and reduced in size. This prevents the use of unshielded
internal cables in external applications and vice-versa.

To prevent ESD damage, the design increased insertion depth from 5 mm to

6.6 mm and the contacts are mounted farther back in both the receptacle and
plug.

To provide EMI protection and meet FCC and CE emission requirements, the
cable has an extra layer of shielding, and the connectors have metal contact-
points.

The connector shield has springs as retention features built in on both the top
and bottom surfaces.

The external connector and cable have a design-life of over five thousand
insertions and removals, while the internal connector is only specified to
withstand fifty.
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SATA (left) and eSATA (right) connectors

Aimed at the consumer market, eSATA enters an external storage market already
served by the USB and FireWire interfaces. Most external hard-disk-drive cases with
FireWire or USB interfaces use either PATA or SATA drives and "bridges" to
translate between the drives' interfaces and the enclosures' external ports, and this
bridging incurs some inefficiency. Some single disks can transfer 131 MB/s during
real use,[8] about four times the maximum transfer rate of USB 2.0 or FireWire 400
(IEEE 1394a) and almost twice as fast as the maximum transfer rate of FireWire
800, though the S3200 FireWire 1394b spec reaches ~400 MB/s (3.2 Gbit/s).
Finally, some low-level drive features, such as S.M.A.R.T., may not operate through
USB or FireWire bridging. eSATA does not suffer from these issues provided that
the controller manufacturer (and its drivers) presents eSATA drives as ATA devices,
rather than as "SCSI" devices (as has been common with Silicon Image, JMicron,
and NVIDIA nForce drivers for Windows Vista); In those cases, even SATA drives
will not have low-level features accessible. USB 3.0's 4.8Gbit/s and Firewire's future
6.4Gb/s will be faster than eSATA I, but the eSATA version of SATA 6G will operate
at 6.0Gb/s (the term SATA III is being eschewed by the SATA-IO to avoid confusion
with SATA II 3.0 Gb/s which was colloquially referred to as "SATA 3G" [bps] or
"SATA 300" [MB/s] since 1.5 Gb/s SATA I and 1.5 Gb/s SATA II were referred to as
both "SATA 1.5G" [b/s] or "SATA 150" [MB/s]). They will therefore operate at
negligible differences of each other [21].
HDMI, Ethernet, and eSATA ports on a Sky+ HD Digibox
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eSATA can be differentiated from USB 2.0 and FireWire external storage for several
reasons.

As of early 2008, the vast majority of mass-market computers have USB ports and
many computers and consumer electronic appliances have FireWire ports, but few
devices have external SATA connectors.

For small form-factor devices (such as external 2.5-inch disks), a PC-hosted USB or
FireWire link supplies sufficient power to operate the device.

Where a PC-hosted port is concerned, eSATA connectors cannot supply power, and
would therefore be more cumbersome to use.

Owners of desktop computers that lack a built-in eSATA interface can upgrade
them with the installation of an eSATA host bus adapter (HBA), while notebooks
can be upgraded with Card bus or Express Cardversions of an eSATA HBA.

With passive adapters the maximum cable length is reduced to 1 metre (3.3 ft) due
to the absence of compliant eSATA signal-levels.

Full SATA speed for external disks (115 MB/s) have been measured with external
RAID enclosures.