Intel has been a leading force, and it is one of over 160 companies driving the Serial ATA initiative to enable low cost, high-performance, next-generation disk interconnects. As a leading supplier of storage building blocks, including Intel® Architecture Processors, motherboards, I/O processors, ethernet NICs, RAID controllers, and iSCSI HBAs, Intel sees Serial ATA as a critical technology for next-generation storage platforms.

Serial ATA is a disk-interface technology developed by a group of the industry's leading vendors to replace parallel ATA. The group known as the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) owns the development of the Serial ATA technology and maintenance of its specifications. Scalability - Serial ATA is a point-to-point connection and allows multiple ports to be aggregated into a single controller that is typically located either on the motherboard or as an add-in, RAID card.

Serial ATA, the successor to parallel ATA for data storage, is a point-to-point connection that delivers full throughput to each storage device by allowing a single controller to manage multiple ports. Serial ATA technology starts at transfer rates of 1.5 Gbit/sec with a roadmap up to 3.0 Gbit/sec and ultimately up to 6.0 Gbit/sec. Serial ATA cables are thinner, simpler to route and install, and provide better airflow for system cooling than parallel ATA cables.

Serial ATA is a high performance disk interface designed for mainstream computing applications. Handheld and consumer devices have a different set of technical requirements including modest transfer rates and maximum power efficiency. As a result of these unique characteristics, CE-ATA is focused on defining solutions for highly cost-effective integration and maximum power efficiency that will facilitate the incorporation of digital storage into handheld and consumer electronic products.

Serial ATA is the latest standard in IDE(Atapi) devices. The maximum speed of Serial ATA is 150MB/s (the maximum speed of Parallel ATA is 133MB/s, the ATA133 standard). The cable for serial ATA has a minimum of 4 wires (extra ground wires can be applied), a 7-pin connectro and a maximum length of 1metre (about 3.1 feet). Because of the serial protocol only 1 device can be connected to each cable.

The ATA will be the world's first radio telescope dedicated to the SETI search. The ATA is almost 1,000 times faster than the Arecibo telescope, between 20 and 2000 times faster than the Very Large Array (depending on the scientific program) and 50 times faster than the Green Bank Telescope. The ATA will be the fastest Radio telescope in the world making it perfect for doing surveys.

One of the primary requirements of the Serial ATA 1.0 specification was to maintain backward compatibility with existing operating system drivers to eliminate incompatibility issues.

Because of the legacy support inherent in the specification, operating support will be simplified. The Serial ATA specification allows for additional features to be added to applications. Additional features will be subject to normal driver validation processes.

A5. Serial ATA's adoption by the marketplace will likely follow a phased transition path, so Parallel and Serial ATA drives will exist concurrently in the marketplace for the foreseeable future. As with most technology innovations, adoption will follow the price and availability curve.

Yes. Adaptec's broad family of Serial ATA RAID solutions will also include chip-level solutions, zero channel solutions, and 4- and 8-port add-in cards. The family provides cost-effective, high-performance storage connectivity and data protection for desktop PCs and entry-level and mid-range servers. Yes.

SAS complements SATA by adding dual porting, full duplex and device addressing, plus it offers higher reliability, performance and data availability services, as well as logical SCSI compatibility. STA will continue to enhance these metrics as the specification evolves, including increased device support and longer cabling distances.

The Adaptec 1210SA manufacturer's suggested retail price is $75, the same price as the Adaptec 1200A. The Serial ATA solution offers higher performance, up to 1.5 Gbit/sec per port, versus a maximum data transfer rate of 100 MByte per channel for the Adaptec 1200A card. If you are in the market for new drives and planning for the future with Serial ATA drives, then the Adaptec 1210SA is your best choice.

While not native, SAS hard drives can be used on SATA desktops and workstations by adding a host bus adapter.

Hard disk drives, cables, enclosures, and controller vendors have been supplying Serial ATA products to the industry since 2002. It is expected that additional product areas, such as optical disk drives (e.g. DVDROM, CDRW) will begin ramping with Serial ATA beginning in 2006.

Serial ATA technology provides a new serial interconnect designed to change the way vendors develop storage systems. The first deployments, where price is an important issue, were intended for client applications, entry-level servers and network-attached storage. As the infrastructure continues to develop, Serial ATA will continue to penetrate into higher-end servers and more complex storage systems.

Serial ATA initially defined a roadmap starting at 1.5 gigabits per second (equivalent to a data rate of 150MB/s) and migrating to 3.0 gigabits per second (300 MB/s), then to 6.0 gigabits per second (600 MB/s). This roadmap supports up to 10 years of storage evolution, based on historical trends.

Serial ATA supports legacy drivers for Parallel ATA. OEMs can deploy Serial ATA, today, using existing parallel ATA drivers.

Easier configuration and design with cables that are thinner, have smaller connectors, and are simpler to route and install Ability to use HDD technology across multiple segments such as desktops, entry and midrange servers, and networked storage Improved silicon design with lower voltage that will ease current design requirements in Parallel ATA Compatibility with today's software that will enable Serial ATA to run on the new architecture without modification

A3. Serial ATA is a high-speed serial link replacement for the parallel ATA attachment of primary internal storage devices. The table below lists some of the features and benefits of Serial ATA. A4. The Escalade 8506 series of RAID controllers is designed using 3ware's field-proven StorSwitch? architecture.

A6. The initial, primary benefit of Serial ATA will be the simplicity of system design due to the new cables. As storage solutions based on Serial ATA drives and controllers arrive in the market, end users will benefit from the lower price of ATA RAID solutions. A7. You get the same performance advantages on both our 7506 Series parallel RAID controllers and 8506 series Serial ATA controllers.

A8. No. Serial ATA is an inside-the-box solution for attaching drives and peripherals. USB will be the primary way to connect external peripherals to the PC.

A9. Serial ATA is a point-to-point topology. This means that each drive has a unique cable attached to the PCI bus. You cannot daisy chain devices using Serial ATA. However there will be significant performance advantages from this point-to-point architecture. A10. Eventually the market for parallel ATA drives will diminish, as Serial ATA becomes the standard on desktops. At that point in time, Serial ATA drives will likely be less expensive that parallel ATA drives.

A13. Serial ATA electronics, cables and connectors will differ from Parallel ATA, however the technology is software compatible and OS transparent. There will be adapters to facilitate forward- and backward-compatibility of hard disks on PC systems. 3ware provides a Parallel-to-Serial ATA converter to enable the use of Parallel ATA drives on its 8500 Series of Serial ATA RAID controllers.

A14. Industry benefits of Serial ATA include systems, which are easier to design with cables that are simple to route and install, smaller cable connectors with improved silicon design, lower voltage that alleviates current design requirements in Parallel ATA and compatibility with today's software, that will run on the new architecture without modification. A15. Serial ATA supports all ATA and ATAPI devices, including CDs, DVDs, tapes devices, high capacity removable devices and CDRW's.

A16. Serial ATA is software compatible with Parallel ATA and requires no changes to operating systems.

A17. The Serial ATA promoters group includes 3ware, APT Technologies Inc, Dell Computer Corporation, International Business Machines, Intel Corporation, Maxtor Corporation, Quantum Corporation, and Seagate Technology. Information on joining the working group is available at www.serialata.com. New members are welcome.

A3: SAS will be used in the same environments in which SCSI and Fibre Channel are employed today. SAS is designed to be used in high availability, enterprise environments where maximum random performance is required. SATA on the other hand is optimized for sequential I/O operations where the requirement is to transfer large sequential blocks of data to and from a drive.

If you are installing Windows XP on a system where you only have Serial ATA Drives you might encounter a problem where Windows does not seem to detect your Hard Drive and reports "No mass storage device found" during an installation (this occurs in Windows NT and Windows 2000 as well). This is because there are no SATA HD drivers in Windows XP/2K/NT and you need to load 3rd party drivers (just like with many SCSI drives).