Serial ATA (SATA) is the next generation bus technology designed for connecting hard disks, optical devices and other secondary storage devices to the computer system. SATA will replace the aging ATA technology in personal computers (primarily) and other computing systems. SATA is designed for only direct attached storage (DAS) devices. SATA devices use serial links that operate at higher speeds and consume lower power than the ATA busses. SATA currently in its 2.0 revision supports up to 3 Gb/s data transfers per device. All SATA 1.0 devices can work perfectly with SATA 2.0 busses and vice-versa with full compatibility. However, as one could infer, SATA 2.0 devices when connected to a SATA 1.0 bus will perform at SATA 1.0 speeds. Some SATA devices support hot-plug capability and can be used with external JOBDs. And some SATA connectors provide an upgrade path to higher performance SAS devices. Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology, featured on some SATA II products, allow for high performance SATA disks. SATA devices are generally well suited for high volume, non-critical usage cases. SATA disks provide an exceptional value with high storage volumes at low costs. SATA disk are available up to 1.5TB per disk capacities. For example: * For a large compute nodes cluster, SATA disks are ideal for local storage. * For a home computer, SATA disks are ideal by providing high volume at low costs. More information available at www.sata-io.org/esata.asp