SATA connectors can bring many benefits in terms of power consumption, ease of installation, hot plug support, internal heat dissipation, and drive configuration. At an economical price, it has achieved a higher level of excellent performance, high capacity, high protection and ease of use for the external storage solution.
As the storage industry transitions from parallel interface to serial interface technology, the I/O interfaces of the latest desktop PCs, mobile PCs, storage devices and some server applications have begun to transform to serial technology. According to market analysts, overall Serial ATA (SATA) sales including connectors, sockets and cables are expected to reach 903 million units, compared with 141 million units in 2003.
As far as the serial interface technology itself is concerned, it has the advantages of reducing cables, increasing data throughput, and improving crosstalk and impedance matching problems. In addition, people's enthusiasm for serial interfaces can also be partly attributed to the vigorous promotion of leading chip and connector manufacturers. For example, Intel recently launched the 925X Express and 915G Express chipsets, both of which integrate a SATA controller and support four SATA ports.
Some connector and cable manufacturers, including Circuit Assembly, FCI and Molex have recently expanded their SATA product lines to include more configurations and options. Rick Lewis, director of industrial marketing at Bishop&Associates, a market research firm, said that the key factor triggering the take-off of a new standard is that Intel’s chipset began to support it, and serial interface technology is now in this period.
In addition, in the opinion of Dave Sideck, FCI’s regional sales manager, there are other factors that will jointly affect the transition of interface technology to SATA. For example, the high-speed serial PCI Express PC architecture brings huge changes and is driving people to seek new motherboard designs. , SATA will be part of it. Another potential driving factor is the approval of the second-generation SATA specification SATA II, which is currently in the approval stage. SATA II increases the signal speed from 1.5Gbit/s to 3Gbit/s.