Most people take hard drives for granted and they generally have only a passing concern relating to the storage capabilities of the hardware. Nothing could be further from the real important issues at hand. Speed is just as important as the drives capacity to store data.
The Advanced Technology Attachment or as it is commonly known as ATA is a parallel interface which is composed of 16-bits and used to utilize and control computer drives. The ATA is not a new product and was first introduced back in 1986. Since its inception 18 years ago it has undergone many small and large modifications and evolutions during its brief existence. In all reality it is surprising that current technological progression has not replaced it with something of a more modern flavor. The most updated version of the ATA is officially referred to as the ATA-7 but in general, it is often simply referred as only the ATA. You will often hear of this device being mention by other common names such as parallel ATA device, EIDE, IDE, Ultra-DMA, Ultra-ATA, PATA and ATAPI among others
SATA on the other hand means Serial Advance Technology Attachment which is actually an evolution of the early ATA however this is only a 1-bit method and sometimes not as effective. SATA hard drives can readily be distinguished from the ATA versions though the different power and data connections located on the back of the data drive.
Aside from offering the user convenience during the installation of this hardware another major difference and possibly consider as an advantage is that SATA drives utilize less power but are still able to deliver the same high performance. This is typically considered the main significance reason which sets the SATA drives in a class apart from the ATA drives. It has been proven that SATA drives perform to a maximum of 150 MB per second during any type of data transfer which is far more then the 130 MB per second associated with its ATA counterpart. This was true when it was first introduced and it is just as true today. If you were to search the market place today for SATA drives you would likely find them with speeds as fast as 600 MB per second. This is really a great improvement designed into the on the SATA drive. Couple this incredible speed with its amazing hot-swap capability that is built into each of the SATA drives and you end up with a winning piece of equipment.
With the trend of computing as it is today you can rest assured that the manufacturers will shortly come up with a better drive in the near future. However even if they failed to do so the SATA has really proved its worth though it’s superior performance.
