20 tips in 20 minutes: Considering SATA?

20 tips in 20 minutes: Considering SATA?

What you will learn: Users continue to ask questions about SATA's performance, reliability and best usage. This article offers a collection of expert responses to recent reader queries.


Serial ATA (SATA) is a relatively

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new standard for connecting hard drives into computer systems. And over the past year or so, there has been a lot of interest in SATA among the readers of SearchStorage.com.

SATA is based on serial (one bit at a time) signaling technology, unlike IDE/ATA hard drives that use parallel signaling, and it has several practical advantages over parallel signaling drives. SATA cables are more flexible, thinner and more manageable than the ribbon cables required for conventional parallel ATA hard drives. Also, these cables can be considerably longer than ribbon cables, and crosstalk and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are less likely to be troublesome.

These advantages have generated a huge buzz about SATA, and lots of questions have arisen among users considering implementing this technology. Many see SATA as an ideal candidate for storing aging or less valuable data in tiered-storage systems, as it is relatively affordable. Some have questions about its reliability and performance. Others want to know how it compares with various technologies in the market.

Click on the links below to check out what people like you are wondering about SATA, and learn more about this often-discussed technology from our experts' advice.

1. SATA for small Exchange environments?
2. Tiered storage with SATA
3. SATA reliability and performance
4. SATA disk drive duty cycle
5. Performance: SATA vs. SCSI
6. Is a SATA disk appropriate for a Windows file server cluster?
7. Advantages of ATA and SATA disk drives
8. SATA as an alternative to serial storage architecture?
9. Who's winning the SATA/ATA race?
10. SATA, Fibre Channel and ATA disks on the same array?
11. SATA connectivity issues
12. How SATA drives hook up to a SAN
13. The scoop on SATA and SCSI technologies
14. The difference between SATA and FATA
15. Staging older files to the SATA partition
16. SATA as an alternative to serial storage architecture?
17. FC and SCSI drive resiliency
18. Tiered storage options
19. Using NetBackup to backup Serial ATA
20. Drives with higher MTBF specs tend to last longer

For more information:

Troubleshooting your SATA drive


This was first published in October 2005

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