Overview

SATA was the standard interface for connecting hard drives and SSDs for many years. While it has been surpassed by NVMe for high-performance storage, it remains widely used for bulk storage and in older systems.

Versions

  • SATA 1.0: 1.5 Gbps.
  • SATA 2.0: 3.0 Gbps.
  • SATA 3.0: 6.0 Gbps (the most common modern version).

Limitations

SATA was designed for spinning disks and has a maximum theoretical speed of around 600 MB/s, which is a bottleneck for modern flash memory.

Related Terms