Many of the storage devices in our modern computers rely on a cable for connectivity. In this video, you’ll learn about connecting drives with SATA and eSATA interfaces.
If you’re connecting a hard drive inside of a desktop computer, then you’re probably using a standard interface known as SATA. This is a Serial AT Attachment, and there have been a number of different versions of SATA through the years. There was a SATA revision 1.0 that supported 1.5 gigabits per second. Version 2.0 doubled the speed to 3 gigabits per second. Version 3.0 doubled the speed again to 6 gigabits per second. With SATA revision 3.2, the speeds increased to 16 gigabits per second.
And there’s an external version of SATA known as eSATA. It’s very similar in functionality to the internal version of SATA, and it supports connecting an external drive over a cable that’s approximately 2 meters in length. The SATA standard supports two physical connections on the back of these storage drives, one that is 15 pins. The longer connector is used for power, and the smaller connector, which is 7 pins, is used for data. This particular drive not only supports the SATA power connection, but it also supports the older style molex? Power connector.
With SATA, there is a direct connection between the drive itself and the motherboard connector. It’s a one-to-one relationship, so the one cable that you’re plugging in for power has a single cable that’s plugging into your power source or your power supply. The other cable used for data is a single cable that’s running from the storage drive to the data connector on the motherboard. SATA doesn’t support any type of daisy chaining or multiple drives on a single cable, so this makes it very easy to understand. If there are eight SATA interfaces on a motherboard, it can support eight total drives.
The SATA connectors are very easy to pick out on a motherboard, such as this one. You can see the SATA connectors are here closer to the bottom of this motherboard. If we zoom up a bit, you can see this motherboard supports both SATA 2 and SATA 3 standard connectors, and it looks like there’s a total of six connectors on this motherboard. Here’s another motherboard with a slightly different alignment of SATA connections, and this motherboard appears to support four different SATA data connections.
As I mentioned before, it’s a one-to-one relationship between the connector on the motherboard and the connector on the storage drive. You can see we have a blue, orange, and black cable coming from the SATA connections on this motherboard, and they’re corresponding to the blue, orange, and black data connectors on these drives. This is obviously only half of the connections that we’ll need for these drives to operate. They’ll need power. So we need to plug in the SATA power connectors on each of these drives.
It’s relatively straightforward to connect a SATA drive. You obviously have the data connection and the power connection. To be able to connect the drive to the data line, we simply plug in the data cable, and now we have a connectivity between this drive and the motherboard. As I mentioned earlier, there are not only standards for internal SATA connections, but there’s also a standard for an external SATA connection.
And these are different types of connectors. The signal sent across the wire is effectively the same between the internal and external drive, but the connector itself is slightly different between the two. It’s difficult to put these side by side because obviously, the SATA standard is generally on the inside of the computer, and the eSATA standard is almost always on the outside of the computer.
But you can see the SATA connection has that very distinctive L shape associated with it, and that cable is very different than the one you would use for eSATA, which has a completely different style. And you obviously can’t plug an eSATA into a SATA connection and vice versa.
If you’re using an eSATA, you will need an eSATA cable. And if you’re plugging in internally to a SATA drive, you will need a SATA cable. So if you’re looking at the back of your computer and you see a couple of connectors that you may not immediately recognize, have a closer look. Those might be eSATA connections.