![]() An eSATA card or cards can also be installed, allowing a very large number of drives in external enclosures. Mac Pro users can install four internal SATA drives in the drive bays (6 with a 3rd-party bracket). SATA speed might be or soon will be a limiting factor for emerging solid state drives. While very fast, this is a limiting factor when using technologies that share a single SATA cable eg port multiplication Why. SATA speed is about double the maximum sustained speed of any single hard drive available today. In today’s Macs, SATA II is the standard way of connecting an internal drive. SATA is faster than PATA, Firewire and USB 2.0. SATA II provides a 3 gigabit (3000 megabit) maximum speed (with parity, 300 mega bytes/second). Same drives, just different cables, which have different connectors and incorporate shielding from electromagnetic interference. When SATA is used externally it’s called eSATA (“e” for external). There exist SATA (1.5 megabit) and SATA II (3 megabit) here SATA should be understood as SATA II all current drives are SATA II. ![]() Alternatives such as SAS are excellent, but very expensive compared to SATA on absolute terms, and in cost per gigabyte. It is widespread and low-cost relative to comparable technologies like SAS (serial attached SCSI). SATA is the highest performance mainstream drive technology (hard drive or solid state). See a comparison of SATA an Firewire 800 speed. ![]() In actual usage, SATA is very fast, Firewire 800 is reasonably fast for some uses, and Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 are dog-slow. ![]() For example, Firewire 800 is rated at about 100 megabytes per second, but I’ve never measured more than about 70MB/sec. Specifications vs realityĭon’t get suckered into believing specifications. UPDATE Feb 2014: current best connection types are USB3 and Thunderbolt. Each standard has its own connector and cable requirements, along with differing performance and applicability. SATA, eSATA, PATA, Firewire, USB, SAS, SCSI - the acronyms are not too important, these are all just different ways of connecting storage to your Mac. Send Feedback Related: eSATA, hard drive, optimization, RAID, storage, USB ![]()
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