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.

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.

Ans: 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).

Yes, however, some other manufacturers' drivers may incorrectly assume a PCI-X Sonnet card is another SATA card; kernel panics may occur; the PCIe cards are not suspect to this problem.

Because SATA II is nearly four times faster than Firewire and over six times faster than USB, it is the ideal interface for audio and video editing applications, high-end graphics, and all your other capacity hungry applications that demand continuous high performance throughput. A7. When an external drive without RAID fails, all data is lost. Without RAID a failed drive can mean the loss of hours of irreplaceable creative output.

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 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.

High performance today and tomorrow: First generation Serial ATA offers 1.5Gb/sec performance compared to a maximum of 133 MB/sec for parallel ATA. Serial ATA plans for at least two more generations of performance enhancements at 300 MB/sec and 600 MB/sec with the same cables and connectors. No-cost impact for desktop PCs: Serial ATA drives are expected to eventually be at par with the cost of parallel disk drives and cabling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.