Why is Serial ATA Important?
The main advantage of Serial ATA serial interconnects compared to its predecessor Parallel ATA is, that they don’t suffer electrical signal integrity problems as seen in shared bus architectures with high voltage and high pin count. Serial ATA offers more headroom for future speed scalability without architectural modifications and is, at the register level, SW compatible to Parallel ATA. Thus Serial ATA requires no changes to existing software and operating systems in order to function, and provides backward compatibility with existing operating environments, adding performance headroom for years to come. This is why it has enjoyed industry-wide support from PC OEMs, semiconductor manufacturers, and leading vendors of storage devices and software companies.
