Ready to upgrade your hard drive and found you're dealing with a SATA connector? SATA drives are easy to set up, support hot swapping, and the interface is reasonably fast. We'll show you everything you need to know about installing a SATA drive, and how to connect the power and data cable.
What Are SATA Drives
Serial ATA (SATA) connectors remain a common interface between the drive and the motherboard. The image above shows a 2.5" SATA hard drive from Fujitsu with the data port on the left and the power port on the right. On older SATA drives, you might also see a 4-pin Molex power connector. You'll find SATA interfaces in both hard drisk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs).
SATA drives were introduced to replac IDE and Enhanced IDE (Parallel ATA) drives. SATA removes the master-slave relationship between parallel hard drives, with each drive connecting to the motherboard using its own SATA adapter.
