Let's take a closer look at the Barracuda 7200.7. Externally, these hard drives look pretty much like a regular IDE hard drive. The only visible difference is the power cable adapter and data interface. Below is a picture of the power cable adapters (left) and the SATA data cables (right).

     Power cable adapters? Yes, you must use a power cable adapter with SATA hard drives. The reason for this is the drives are hot swappable, and the cables are designed in such a way to apply power to the drive in a certain order. Eventually, these power cable adapters will be obsolete due to the fact most power supply manufacturers are starting to add SATA power cables to their power supplies. For example, all Antec and Enermax PSUs now come with SATA power cables.

     Let's review some of the advantages of SATA and SATA data cables. I know we have covered this in past reviews, but I believe it is important to remind everyone just how great SATA drives really are.

     The great news about Serial ATA is that it solves many of the problems we have had to deal with over the years. With IDE, we have been extremely restricted with cable lengths, bulky and unsightly ribbon cables, and slow transfer rates. With SATA, data transfer rates are now up to 150 MByte/s with the promise of becoming much faster over the years. As for the cables, SATA cables are slim, more attractive, can be up to a meter in length, and are hot swappable (with the correct software support). This is a far cry from the abilities of IDE. SATA, is also backwards compatible with IDE hard drives. All you need is a converter.