What is a SATA Hard Drive?

Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or SATA is the latest in hard drive connections.  This connection type has a few major advantages over its predecessor the ide/ata drive.  The first one is the cable size difference.  The cable is only 4 pins or about 1/2" wide versus its 2" 40-pin IDE cousin.  Following is that its data transfer rate is not limited to 133mbps (megabytes per second).  While they start at 150mbps, SATA can now reach up to 6.0gbps (gigabytes per second) with a much higher storage capacity of up to 2 Terabyte (currently).  SATA allows for hot-swapping, which means you would not need to power down the system to pull a drive out of a bay. Instead, pull it out and put another in.  This is very nice for on the go data centers or if you need to lockup the data securely in a vault at the end of the day. The once dreaded thought of a RAID configuration is now a snap, giving SCSI hard drives a new competitor. One last advantage is that there is no need to set jumpers to slave or master settings.  This is controlled by the motherboard's bios.  Drives are prioritized per the BIOS settings specified by the user or manufacturer.

Above as you can see the connectors are very different from an IDE/ATA drive.  The cable is not scale and blown up for clear viewing.  RCCS is currently only using SATA hard drives in all new computers that are build or upgraded, unless the older computer does not have a SATA port, only then do we install an IDE based drive.  If you are in the market for a new hard drive we highly recommend Seagate branded hard drives.  Thanks for stopping, and be sure to check out all the other information on the site, as we are continually adding information as it is available.

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