SATA & PATA

When You have to know about hard disks the first thing you need to know is their interface and SATA & PATA is two different interfaces of hard disks with motherboard, PATA is the older interface and slower connection than SATA.

   PATA or Parallel ATA is designed by Western Digital on 1986, it’s a 40 pin interface and also called IDE. PATA runs on speed maximum 133 Mb/s, in 1986 when PATA first came into market it used to run at 16Mb/s speed and there was later 33, 66, 100, 133 Mb/s speed. PATA is not hot pluggable under any circumstances and PATA works on Master and Slave technology so in PATA one hard drive works like a master and controls other drives like DVD drive, You can’t make RAID in PATA.

SATA or serial ATA or serial advanced technology attachment was first in market on 2003, although when SATA first came into market could not impress at all, because SATA 1.0 (1.5GB/s) has original speed of 150Mb/s slightly faster than the latest PATA connection and hot pluggable but SATA was costlier that time. But after release of SATA 2.0(3Gb/s) on April 2004 of original speed 300Mb/s SATA started to take market share aggressively because SATA was faster , simple and less space consuming, SATA was only 7 pin connector, and after SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) original speed of 600Mb/s SATA took all market share on 2009.

e SATA

Most of the people don’t know that there is SATA 3.1(released on 2011) & 3.2 (released on 2013), which has theoretical 16Gb/s speed and actual almost 2Gb/s speed, SATA 3.2 is called SATA express, it works like a pci bus that’s why it’s that faster, And don’t confuse  this with e SATA, e SATA is external SATA which can be used like usb for hot pluggable storage device.

SATA power

POWER

PATA power

PATA used to use a 4 pin simple MOLEX power connector but SATA uses a 15 pin SATA power connector.