▷ Sata connector: what it is, types of connectors and utility

The SATA connector is currently the standard interface for connecting hard drives. In this article we will explain in detail what the SATA connector is and what it can be used for on our equipment. Surely you know what it is since you will have a hard drive connected to this port almost certainly, but do you really know what its speed and operation are? all that we will involve here.

Index of contents

The evolutions of the storage systems mean that we get more and more performance and amount of storage per unit. Because of this, connection technologies must adapt and evolve. In a very short time the interface that we will talk about today will be history, and this is due to the appearance of solid hard drives or SSDs and the need to find faster connections than the current one.

What is the SATA interface

The SATA interface or connector is the evolution of the old IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) interface, also called PATA or Parallel Advanced Technologies Attachment. This old interface was characterized by its large connectors in which there were up to 80 physical wires or cables glued together, working in parallel with the limitations that this entails.

In order to overcome the speed limitation of the PATA connector located at 166 MB / s, in 2001 at the hands of the Serial ATA Working Group, a new interface was born called SATA (Serial-ATA) which abandoned the parallel standard to provide a serial connection of the devices in the connected.

SATA is a data transfer interface between a storage device or CD / DVD reader and the motherboard of a computer. It provides higher speeds than the old interfaces and ensures better optimization of the data flow mainly due to the fact that there is a cable exclusively dedicated to each unit connected to it. In addition, it provides other windows such as the following:

• It supports longer cable lengths, and they are also much smaller It has the ability to hot- plug, just as it happens with USB ports It is a standardized interface that supports all motherboards on the market

SATA connector transmission speeds

This interface has different evolutions in terms of data transmission speed.

SATA 1.0

This was the first version working at 1.5Gb / s hence the SATA 1.5Gb / s designation. With this connection we could reach a real speed of 150 MB / s

SATA 2.0

In this second version, speed doubled, reaching 3Gb / s and a speed of 300MB / s. Also known as SATA 3Gb / s

SATA 3.0

This is the standard currently implemented by all hard drives with this interface. In this case transmission speed is 6Gb / s resulting from a maximum speed of 600 MB / s. is known as SATA 6Gb / s

SATA connector: characteristics and types

SATA is a point-to-point connection technology, that is, we will have a physical connection between two devices directly and without interference or with more devices connected as it happened in the case of PATA connectors where it was necessary to configure a device as master and another as a slave to make the connection possible.

One of the most significant measures of the SATA connection is that all the devices that use it have exactly the same connection interface, that is, both desktops and laptops or servers will have the same standardized connector in which it will be possible to connect the following devices:

• Mechanical 3.5 "Hard Drives 2.5" Portable Hard Drives Optical Drive Readers like CDs and DVDs SSD Solid Storage Drives

It is important to mention that SAS technology, evolution of SCSI also has exactly the same connector. In addition, we will have the ability to work with SATA type hard drives connected under the SAS protocol, but it will not be possible to work with SAS hard drives in the SATA protocol.

In addition to the data connector that is responsible for transmitting information from the board to the hard drive and vice versa, we also have a new power connector that replaces the classic 4-pin Molex connector. We will see the distribution of both cables below

SATA data connector

As is logical, it is in charge of providing the physical bus to transmit the data from the hard disk to the motherboard so that the CPU is able to process the information. This " Wafer " type cable is made up of 7 conductors under the same encapsulation, normally rectangular.

The connector is 8mm wide and has a 90 degree termination at one end to identify the correct male and female connector position. This connector can have a maximum length of 1 m, compared to the maximum of 45 cm that IDE cables had. This is the function table for each driver

	Pin No.	Function
	one	land
two	A + (transmission)
3	A- (transmission)
4	land
5	B + (reception)
6	B- (reception)
7	land

Power connector

The adoption of the SATA interface also brought with it a new, more sophisticated power connector than the traditional 4-pin 12V Molex. Like SATA, this is a " Wafer " type and has 15 pins, making it wider than the data. Despite having 15 pins, only five cables enter the connector, in this case two black cables, one yellow, one orange and the other red. Let's look at the properties of each conductor.

	Pin No.	Function
	one	Voltage (3.3V)
two	Voltage (3.3V)
3	Voltage (3.3V) Pre-charge
4	land
5	land
6	land
7	Voltage (5V) Pre-charge
8	Voltage (5V)
9	Voltage (5V)
10	land
eleven	Staggered spinup / activity
12	land
13	Voltage (12V) Pre-charge
14	Voltage (12V)
fifteen	Voltage (12V)

Other SATA Connectors

External eSATA or SATA connector

In addition to the above, we also find other connections such as external SATA, which is characterized by being a connector intended for external storage units that do not work through a USB interface. Although this interface is not widely used, since the transmission speed is 115 MB / s, much lower than the performance of a USB 3.0.

As for advantages we find for example that the drives will not need the conversion between SATA and USB and that it has capacity for RAID disks.

MSATA or Mini SATA connector

This connector uses an interface similar to the Mini-PCI but they are not equivalent connectors nor can they be interchangeable. This interface has the same features as a normal SATA and is intended for 1.8-inch hard drives or SSDs

SATA Express connector

This interface is an evolution of SATA capable of working with both SATA hard drives and PCI-Express drives. It has its own interface and is capable of reaching 16 Gb / s or what is the same, 1.97 GB / s

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We hope this article has been useful to you. What hard disk do you have?