An Acronym for Serial ATA. Compare PATA.

A cheaper alternative to SCSI for connecting BlockDevices. The performance of SATA-1 compliant hard drives is equivalent with 10,000 RPM SCSI drives (Ultra160/Ultra320) (provided of course that the SATA drive is 10,000 RPM and has similar cache).

SATA drives are like SCSI drives in that they do not just work for boot devices if you are building your own LinuxKernel or with some LinuxDistributions.

The reason for this is that they need a driver and the driver is on the disk – catch 22.

The solution is one of two ways:

• For the relevant drivers build into the LinuxKernel rather than as a Module
• Use initrd(4) - see InitialRamDisk for more information

CategoryHardware