Serial ATA Goes Retail

Seagate and Best Buy have teamed to become the first to offer Serial ATA hard drives to retail consumers. Seagate hard drive kits featuring the new Serial ATA storage interface are now on Best Buy shelves.

Serial ATA (SATA) is starting to gain steam as the new standard interface for PC storage and is expected to eventually replace parallel ATA in all PCs.
Seagate is touting its unique native Serial ATA design as a major improvement in hard drive performance with the ability to “handle data more intelligently than parallel ATA hard drives and offer external transfer rates up to 150 Mbytes per second in its first generation — 50 percent faster than the Ultra ATA/100 bus most commonly used today in desktop PCs.”

“Best Buy is pleased to push the edge of technology by offering the Seagate Serial ATA hard drive,” said Scott Wallace, computer peripherals buyer at Best Buy. “The performance and simplicity of this drive will enable the consumer to easily transfer music, movies, and data at high speeds providing an enhanced digital life experience.”

“We’re bringing our consumers hard drives with great performance using the most advanced technology standards, and products that are more reliable, uncomplicated and low-maintenance,” said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president of Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. “As the first to offer the faster, simpler Serial ATA interface, Seagate and Best Buy are helping consumers advance to next-generation systems now, and simplify their systems at the same time.”

Serial ATA’s intelligent data handling and point-to-point connections enable it to move data up to 50 percent faster than the parallel ATA architecture. Its point-to-point connections eliminate device bus sharing, making multi-drive systems work faster, as the full bandwidth of each bus is dedicated to a single hard drive. SATA also features 32-bit Cyclic Redundancy Checking, which provides better reliability and improved data integrity for PCs.

As an added bonus, the Serial ATA interface simplifies installing hard drives and upgrading a system’s storage capacity. SATA uses simple socket-style connectors instead of the traditional 40-pin connectors, making it as easy to plug in as a phone. SATA’s thinner, longer cables are also easier to route, and hot-plug connectivity can mean greater productivity when reconfiguring a PC system. Finally, Serial ATA has eliminated the need to set the tiny master/slave jumpers on the hard drives.

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