OT: New PC!

[JAFisher44]

By the way, SATA is a similar technology to the older PATA technology which is being phased out. PATA, or Parallel ATA, is what you are most likely using if you have the flat ribbon cables connecting your hard drives and cd drives to your computer. Parallel meaning that there are multiple parallel wires in the cable which each carry information at the same time.

In the time of the dinosaurs everything was serial, meaning that there was one wire connecting a drive to a computer. Of course when people ran into frequency limits and could advance no further, someone got the brilliant idea to just add more wires. 8x the connections means 8x the speed.

Well, using parallel wires has its own set of problems. The major one being RF. See, when an electrical signal moves down a wire it creates a sort of radio frequency "shock wave". This shock wave is stronger the higher the frequency of the signal. This RF shock wave interferes with the signals in parallel wires. Over time, several things were done to limit this sort of problem. For example in most modern parallel cables there is an inactive "buffer" wire in between all active wires. This wire helps to absorb the RF interference.

So, now that tech has advanced, we have new materials that can handle far greater frequencies than we used to be able to use, but, if we run in parallel the interference kills the cable. So, we return to serial.

SATA, or Serial ATA, is a new interface for drives that provides serial information transfer for a drive at higher frequencies. Because of the previously stated increases in tech we are now able to increase the frequency to a point that even with only 2 wires (one to send and one to receive) they out-perform 40 wire parallel cables (26 of those carry data). Also, the cables can be much longer for SATA than for PATA, 39 inches vs. 18 inches.

So, basically SATA is a new controller that allows for far faster data transfer at lower power costs. Buy it. Use it. Enjoy it. It's just better.