Hey cool, my article about SATA came out on the PCMag.ph site.
I wrote this very technical article for the January 2006 issue, and I really enjoyed writing it as I learned a lot about Serial ATA (SATA) and consequently, Parallel ATA (PATA), the technology it’s supposed to have replaced. It’s basically a geek’s dream.
The most interesting factoid is the ATA naming schema used by the technical committees in charge of creating standards for hard disks over the years, vis a vis how the manufacturers named them, which is completely different and ultimately made to confuse the market, making it appear their products had improvements where there wasn’t any. Also another revelation: if it wasn’t for SATA II, hard disk technology would be pretty much the same as 5 or 8 years ago, the main difference being only in capacity, but certainly not speed.
Continue reading Whenever I go to Mercury Drug, I think of Native Command Queuing