Thread: Sata and SCSI

Introduced in 2003, the first Sata standard supported a maximum transfer rate of 150MBytes/sec, not much faster than the ATA-7 specification, but this was soon raised to 3.0GBytes/sec (300MBytes/sec) in the next revision of the standard. This faster speed is often incorrectly called Sata II; that's really just the name of the group responsible for the Sata specifications. To avoid misunderstandings, the group has since changed its name to Sata-IO.



The Sata cable uses connectors that require only four pins, not the 80 pins of the ATA cable, which obviously allows for much thinner cables.

Additionally, Sata's lower voltages mean that cables can be longer too. The other advantage of the Sata architecture is that it is point¬to-point, thus doing away with the old master/slave configuration of ATAdrives.

SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) drives have traditionally belonged in the domain of servers and workstations, although they are not so common these days, as serial¬attached SCSI (SAS) drives (see below) are making inroads into this area of the market.