Every owner of a modern personal computer knows what a SATA connector looks like. Serial ATA serial bus (hence the name), designed to connect optical drive drives and hard drives, has replaced the outdated parallel (PATA).
Many still remember the IDE standard hard drives, which used wide and flat cables, consisting of 40 and 80 conductors, to connect to the motherboard. This is not to say that they disrupted air circulation or were uncomfortable, because the installation and installation were not carried out every day. The reason is that the “ceiling” of the transmission speed was reached, amounting to 150 megabits per second, and the addition of additional cores to protect against mutual interference was impractical. As a result, a different standard was proposed - SATA, surpassing PATA (IDE) in a number of parameters. All modern hard drives are hdd-sata devices.
Rules for handling ... connectors
A serial bus loop is almost impossible to confuse with anything else. This is a cable with dimensions of 10x3x330 (width, thickness, length). As a rule, its shell is red (although there are models in blue, yellow and orange colors). Both sides have a SATA connector. Although the developers took into account some of the shortcomings of PATA, ignoring the rules for handling SATA loops, you can not expect stable and long-term operation of the disk subsystem.
First of all, when connecting, you must carefully inspect the SATA connector on the wire: its special design does not allow you to make an erroneous connection. The connectors on the circuit board and the cable (sometimes called a plug) must match the internal protrusions. Conclusion: excessive force is unacceptable. Few people know that the SATA connector does not imply frequent on / off cycles. The contacts installed inside are thin curved (spring-loaded) copper strips, which when connected gives a high-quality electrical contact. With frequent switching, the clamping force is reduced, which can lead to failures in data transfer.
Conclusion: you need to use a special solution - eSATA or, if there is no other way out (as in the case of laptops), SATA-usb converters that allow you to connect devices not to the serial ATA bus, but to USB.
Non-obvious disadvantage
Some users are already faced with the fact that sometimes a SATA device completely stops functioning for no apparent reason or there are various transmission failures (from errors to slowdowns). One reason is that the cable and board connectors are disconnected. It is possible to restore operability by extracting and re-enabling the loop. However, there is a more reliable solution. You must purchase a SATA cable in which a metal latch-lock is located on the connector. Thanks to her, spontaneous disconnection is practically excluded. Such a loop is 30-50% more expensive than a regular one. Some motherboard manufacturers come with a product that offers one such cable. In general, SATA connectors are quite reliable and very rarely fail. If you follow the above recommendations, then the duration of their operation coincides with the operating time of the entire board.