Micro Center  Connect with Us  INFO: What is Serial ATA (SATA)?
An example of SATA ports on a motherboard. Serial ATA or SATA is
a computer bus interface designed to connect host bus adapters
to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical
drives. SATA was designed to replace the older Parallel ATA or
PATA, also known as IDE or EIDE. SATA does not use slave/master
states, instead each drive is given an individual numbered port
on the motherboard and the drives use that port number for
identification, making it easier to install a SATA drive as it
uses no jumper settings.  An example of a right-angle SATA data
cable.  There are currently three versions of SATA which are all
compatible with one another. The first SATA interface was SATAI,
also known as SATA 1.5 because of its 1.5 Gb/s transfer rate.
The second was SATA II, also known as SATA 3.0 because of its
3.0 Gb/s transfer rate. The latest is SATA III, also known as
SATA 6.0 because of its 6.0 Gb/s transfer rate.  An example of
the SATA power