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SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is one of the most common bus interfaces for connecting mass storage devices to a computer system.

SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is the latest iteration of common bus interfaces for connecting mass storage devices, the previous technology being PATA (parallel ATA, commonly known as the Western Digital proprietary name IDE or Integrated Drive Electronics).

There are currently three revisions of the SATA standard, supporting 1.5 Gbit/s, 3 Gbit/s, and 6 Gbit/s transfer rates for revision 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 respectively. Since the SATA bus uses 8b/10b encoding, the actual transfer rate in bytes per second is given by the values listed above divided by ten (instead of the usual eight). This means that the maximum transfer throughput for the SATA revisions are 150 MB/s, 300 MB/s, and 600 MB/s.

The latest revision, SATA 3.0, includes a much larger bandwidth to support the increasing transfer rates of solid-state drives. Conventional hard disks can also reach higher transfer rates by using certain types of RAID.

Related Tags:

  • Parent tag for all hard-drive bus technologies.
  • Sister tag for an older technology.