- SATA is very common in today's PCs and laptops.
The serial AT attachment,
or SATA,
or sata or sada, however you wanna say it,
is a computer bus that's used for the transmission of data
between hard drives and the motherboard or an adapter card.
It allows for data transfer rates or DTRs
between 1.5 gigabits per second and 16 gigabits per second
depending on the revision of SATA.
Traditional SATA uses two cables,
data and power.
Data connectivity is accomplished with a 7-pin cable
which supplies the drive with two pairs of conductors
that work in a serial fashion,
meaning one bit at a time each.
Power is supplied by a 15-pin cable
that includes 3.3 volts, 5 volts, and 12 volts.
Keep in mind that some SATA power cables are color coded.
They're orange, red, and yellow or they simply use
all one color such as black,
including the two black grounding wires.
So this is a typical setup with a 3.5 inch
magnetic based drive, a mechanical drive with moving parts,
and you have that
power port and the data ports
and you use these connectors for those.
Now here we have a 2.5 inch solid state drive, also SATA.
So it has the same types of connectors, 7-pin data
and 15-pin power and they have vertical tabs in the center
so that you know how to orient the cables
when you connect them.
Let's take a look at the SATA revisions over time.
And so first we have SATA Revision 1.0
which has a maximum data transfer rate
of 1.5 gigabytes per second, or 150 megabytes per second.
2.0 did 3 gigabytes per second, or 300 megabytes per second,
but it's unlikely that you'll see either of those
unless it's a pretty old system,
because in 2009,
SATA Revision 3.0 was released,
and so it's been around for at least a decade,
depending on when you're watching this video,
and that allows for 6 gigabytes per second
or 600 megabytes per second.
Now you may say, "Hey, I was dividing by eight
and the math doesn't really work out for me"
and that's because of encoding.
There's actually a little bit of overhead
and this 6 gigabits per second over the connection
actually goes down to about 4.8 gigabits per seconds.
Divide that by eight and then you actually get
600 megabytes per second to the drive maximum.
This is very common as far as SATA goes,
that's the most common that you're gonna see,
but there's also SATA Revision 3.2.
3.2 uses SATA Express,
which can work on an SATA express port,
or it can work within an M.2 configuration or even USB 3.0.
But if you're using M.2
and NVMe,
PCIe-based card will usually be preferred
because it allows for higher data transfer rates.
While this sata 3.2
and SATA Express can do just about two gigabytes per second,
a lot of the NVMe M.2 cards
can go much further than that, they can go up to about
3,500 megabytes per second or 3.5 gigabytes per second.
So these are the two you really wanna know.
3.0 you're gonna see a lot, but you might also see
3.2 out there and the 3.0 port that's used, looks like that.
That is the data port. That's your standard 7-pin port,
similar, and it's basically what we showed before,
this is just looking head on into that port.
That's two of these ports, actually.
3.2 uses a sort of a triple port.
It's three in one and this is known as an 18-pin port.
It's 7 + 7 + 4
and it's one cable that is kind of
three connectors in one that connects to this.
So a little difference there and you need to have that
on the motherboard or on an adapter card to actually
take advantage of SATA Express, or again, like I say
M.2 or USB 3.0, but again, for higher speeds
people are usually going in different directions.
They might be using an M.2 NVMe card currently.
Okay? So a little bit about the SATA revisions.
Definitely wanna memorize it,
commit the SATA 3.0 and 3.2 revisions,
their data transfer rates and the port types to your memory.
So there's a little bit about SATA.