Up Close

     Now let's get up close and personal with the Barracuda Serial ATA V... 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? What the??? Don't panic, but you must use a power cable adapter with SATA hard drives. The reason for this is the drives are hot swappable. So in reality, these adapters are a good thing...

     Let's talk about some of the advantages of SATA and SATA data cables. 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.

SATA Roadmap