I need help understanding SATA

[bartthecartoon]

I have a motherboard that supports Serial ATA drives, but I don't understand SATA at all. I know that it works with both optical and hard drives, but how many can you connect to each connector? Can you have regular drives and SATA drives attached at the same time? My computer's case doesn't have much room, but I would like to be able to keep all of my standard drives while adding some SATA drives...is there a card that will let me bring the connectors out of my case?

 

[turtile]

eSata is what lets you connect Sata drives from outside your case.

Sata can be used with a drive on IDE at the same time

Sata is smaller and faster than IDE

The power connector is smaller and is also serial

Sata can only connect One device from each cord

 

[bartthecartoon]

I have 2 connectors can I use them both for hard drives or both of them for disk drives? Or does one have to be used for a HD and the other one for an optical drive?

 

[trigger_sad]

No, at this point SATA is still mostly for hard drives. Technically you could use one for HD one for a cd-rom or whatever, but at this time still SATA optical drives are a rare thing. Basically whatever can be done on IDE can be done on SATA, SATA's just faster, and smaller, and better management.