Next-generation hard drives that use the new Serial ATA interface are now becoming widely available. SATA marks the first radical change in hard drives in a decade. Existing parallel ATA drives transfer data concurrently on multiple parallel wires within an 80-wire cable. In contrast, SATA drives transfer data at high speeds over a thin 7-wire cable. The interface is a cousin to FireWire and USB 2.0, which also use thin serial cables.

Serial ATA drives offer several advantages over parallel drives, not the least of which is speed. The maximum data transfer rate (or burst rate) for most parallel drives is 100 to 133 megabytes per second. Drives using the first generation of the SATA interface can reach 150 MBps. By 2007 that rate will climb to 600 MBps.

The thin cables Serial ATA drives use also allow cooling air to flow more freely within PC cases, and since you hook up only one drive per SATA connector, there are no jumpers to worry about.

Motherboards are starting to ship with Serial ATA connectors, and the drives will soon be common in off-the-shelf systems. In the meantime, if you want to add an SATA drive to your computer as a second drive for data storage, you'll need an add-in card ($50 to $100). You'll also need Windows 98 SE or above. Earlier versions of Windows don't support SATA.

Note, however, that SATA drives used with add-in cards or with motherboards having a separate SATA controller chip are limited to the 133-MBps speed of the PCI bus. Full-speed SATA requires a motherboard with SATA support in its core logic. Currently, motherboards based on Intel 865 and 875P (Canterwood) chip sets support full-speed Serial ATA.

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