In the world of computer technology, one of the most vicious battles that have been going on is the storage data transfer rate war. For decades, a lot of companies have been coming up with their storage sizes, rotation per minute on their storage, the maximum gravitational force, or simply G, that it can withstand, and the speed by which data is accessed or stored. Hard disk interface cables also received attention because of their data transfer rate capacities. From the flat ribbon type cable interface like the ATA-7, it evolved into a narrow cord called the SATA cable.
In the years past, having a one gigabyte storage space is more than adequate for most home computer systems. As application software becomes gigabyte-size hungry, however, the one gigabyte threshold became more irrelevant as the manufacturers rushed in to increase their drive sizes.
As the size of the disks increase, however, the need to access data more rapidly becomes of equal importance too. This is because the larger your disk size is, data access become snail paced. A lot of research has been done to find the right solution on how to further increase the speed of hard disks. Researchers found out that the ribbon cable which interfaces the hard disk to the computer seems to be the culprit behind this seemingly slow hard disk access. The reason is that the last update, ATA-7 for this type of cable only allows a maximum data transfer rate of one hundred thirty three megabytes per second.
This realization prompted and led to the invention of the new Serial ATA interface cable. This new interface connector sports a rather narrow, but a little bit thicker, cable as compared to the ATA-7 ribbon cable. Though the size may be a little bit small, it is compensated by its speed which is at around one hundred fifty megabytes per second. As with any new invention, a research immediately commenced with the purpose of inventing a higher form of SATA which will support data transfer rates of up to six hundred megabytes per second. Now that is more than three times faster than the ATA-7, and more than twice the speed than the present SATA.
Another benefit of SATA is that it is not clunky like the ribbon type ATA-7 flat cable. This makes it easy to install and also allows a lot of air to circulate within your CPU, a fact that is getting increasingly important as processors and RAM become faster thereby generating a lot of heat. Naturally, anything that can enhance the cooling capability of your PC is a welcome development.
With this, the problem of a snail paced data transfer is, for the moment, considered solved. Development for a new SATA, however, did not stop in anticipation of larger drives and demanding software. It is therefore safe to assume that the battle is not over yet.
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