Hard Drive - SATA-II

Serial advanced technology attachment denoted as SATA or Serial ATA, or S-ATA is a computer bus interface mostly connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices including hard drives. It is the most commonly used technology to connect hard drives to a PC's motherboard.

There have been multiple versions of the SATA interface developed to meet the need for increased storage capacity and bandwidth. The SATA technology was first introduced in 2000 to replace ATA and PATA to provide faster data transfer rates and hot-swapping. Advanced host controller interface (AHCI) is the standard interface for SATA which supports hot swapping and native command queuing (NCQ). Hot swapping refers to the ability to replace components of a computer system without having to shut down the entire system. NCQ allows improved performance through the ability to augment the orders of implementation of reading/writing commands. That means commands will be rescheduled and permits the host to send more commands to the hard drive as it searches data for another command. The 6Gbps data transfer throughout makes it superior to previous technologies such as ATA and PATA. SATA is able to run in IDE emulation mode, but it will not support advanced features.

We have helped all our clients across the board to understand how the technology works with HDDs, SSDs, and modules by knowing the specifications of the different SATA versions. A good grasp of these versions of SATA helps in the identification of the right storage capacity options for your application.

SATA II HDD generation or SATA 2.0 of the SATA technology is part of a series of revisions that happened in 2003, 2004, and 2008 that culminated in SATA III or SATA 3.0. With every revision, there was an increase in speed and additional features that support speed and allow for reliable storage drives. However, the physical appearance of the SATA connector was not altered. SATA III is the most commonly used SATA interface and has been through five revisions from 3.1 to 3.5.

SATA II hard disk was previously referred to as SATA 3Gbps which reflected its speeds. This second generation of the SATA technology has a SATA interface with 3Gbps transfer speed and a bandwidth throughput of 300MB/s. The following are SATA II drives you can choose from depending on specific needs: 2TB-5.4K RPM, 2TB-5.9K RPM, 3TB-7.2K RPM.

Notable features of SATA II include:

• Hot plugging – refers to the ability to change a drive as the computer runs.
• Staggered Spin Up – refers to the ability to start disk drives in sequence to ensure even power load at the start of the system.
• Native command queuing – SATA 2.0 drives have an in-built algorithm that chooses the most efficient order to execute commands to improve performance and efficiency. The feature helps to reduce mechanical overhead and improve performance.
• Port multipliers – this help to connect as many as 15 drives to a SATA controller. This feature facilitates the easier building of disk enclosures using SATA drives.
• Port selectors – the feature allows the connection of two hosts to one drive. It helps create redundancy in the drive connection which is very critical in enterprise environments. That means if one of the hosts experiences failure, the second host will take over thereby ensuring continued access to storage.

All SATA generations are compatible both forward and backward. It, therefore, means that SATA II hard disk is backward compatible to function with SATA I ports. Likewise, SATA III is compatible backward to function with SATA I and SATA II ports. In backward compatibility, the maximum speed of the drive will slow down in line with the speed limitations of the port it is connected to. The same is true for lower SATA generations being compatible with higher SATA generations but are limited to their inbuilt speeds.

For users seeking greater speeds than the SATA III limits at 1.5Gbps, 3Gbps, and 6Gbps, there are M.2 and NVMe drives that offer greater performance. These drives have no limitations and will perform more efficiently and are chosen by users focused on speed and performance above everything else.

We have different motherboards with SATA connections and more particularly with SATA II connections and will come with a few SATA cables for the connections that you will use to build a new rig or do upgrades on a rig. Choose from the wide range of SATA cables dependent on what you need and especially when upgrading an older hard drive or other components on your computer. To ensure that you achieve enhanced speeds and performance, you need to buy SATA cables and adapters for compatibility. It may help to depend on your profile and budget to get the latest SATA III standard.

You can fully trust our team to walk you through the options available with SATA II technology and help you choose the best storage for your applications.