Could someone explain Serial ATA to me?

[1ctabor]

What are the benefits? Is is faster than ata? Does it require two drives to perform fast like RAID?

[OS-Wiz]

The big difference is that the data bits are shipped to the local I/O bus serially (one behind the other) rather than in parallel. This simplifies timing and interference problems. They currently aren't any faster; mainly because there aren't any HDs that can even exploit ATA100, even with a cache hit (burst). It will still take two HDs or more to implement RAID.

[Colossus]

The only SATA drives now that are faster then PATA drives are the WD raptor drives which is a SCSI drive with a SATA interface :P No wonder it is faster Plus the price is expensive for a 36GB drive

Currently SATA drive is only faster with write speeds and all the other benchmarks are slower then PATA.

[Ashpool]

The main benefit is that the cables aren't so godawful wide and are very thin at stock.

And it can be used in RAID just as easy as PATA.

[ewitte]

Originally posted by Colossus
The only SATA drives now that are faster then PATA drives are the WD raptor drives which is a SCSI drive with a SATA interface :P No wonder it is faster Plus the price is expensive for a 36GB drive

Currently SATA drive is only faster with write speeds and all the other benchmarks are slower then PATA.

Are you talking about the first beta review? I looked over the stats again. All of the tests beat IDE. A few of them beat the SCSI drives. Although it has nothing to do with SATA. It has to do with the 10,000RPM rotation speed.

Eric

[Colossus]

If you read my post, I talked about the Raptor being faster due to it being a SCSI HD with a SATA interface

All the other SATA drives that are 7200rpm that are not a SCSI drive all performed slower