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Serial ATA
computer bus interface for storage devices / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Serial ATA (SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a standard that has been defined to connect storage devices or optical drives to a computer. The most common standard that was used beforehand was called ATA or IDE; it has been renamed PATA. The main difference between the two lies in the cables: SATA cables have seven wires, PATA cables have 40 or 80. Another difference is that with SATA, there is one cable for each device, while with PATA, all devices are connected to the same cable.
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As of 2022, almost all desktop computers have a SATA interface. PATA is very rare nowadays, but some old computers still use it. Computers that still use PATA are mostly used for industrial applications and embedded systems. Some computers (mostly laptops) do not have a SATA interface. They have an M.2 NVME interface to connect NVME SSDs which are based on the PCIE standard. Some laptops also have an embedded flash memory. SATA will most likely disappear from laptops (and some computers) in the future and be replaced with M.2 NVME SSDs.