what is sata

SATA stands for Serial AT Attachment, which is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. It succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices. SATA is based on serial signaling technology, where data is transferred as a sequence of individual bits. SATA cables are thinner, more flexible, and less massive than the ribbon cables required for conventional PATA hard drives. SATA encompasses two ports: the data connector and the power connector. The former is the short, L-shaped, seven-pin connector, while the latter is the more extended 15-pin connector. SATA devices can be specified to look and act like PATA devices at the application level. SATA was initially developed for electromechanical drives in which an actuator arm writes data to and reads data from sectors on a rotating spindled disk. The SATA standard was later modified to support nonmechanical SSDs based on flash storage. SATA III or 3.0 is the most common SATA interface used today, though there have been five revisions since its introduction, namely 3.1 through 3.5. SATA supports time-saving native command queuing, as well as hot swapping, which allows system components to be replaced while a computer is powered on.