What is SATA Cable?

SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment cables are unique kinds of cables that are generally used to connect several kinds of storage drives, like solid-state drives, hard drives and its types, and optical drives to the computer’s motherboard. This technology has been around since the 2000s and was presented as a replacement for their older PATA cables.

Types of SATA Cables

The SATA cables are available in several kinds and the major kinds are discussed in the following section.

1. Standard SATA Cable

They are traditional and standard SATA cables which are more commonly referred to as SATA-SATA. They are available in various lengths and are suitable for several different applications.

2. Micro SATA

These are the perfect SATA cable which is specially designed to attach the mSATA SSDs to the computer’s motherboard.

3. e-SATA

External SATA or e-SATA is that kind of cable that makes it more manageable for the user to attach the external hard drive to the motherboard of the computer via the e-SATA connection port. So, this SATA cable is used to connect an external part of any device.

4. Low Profile SATA

These SATA cables are useful for all kinds of PC builds that feature hefty GPUs that might obstruct the SATA ports. They are a perfect fit below the extended GPUs without the need to twist the SATA cable.

Other Types of SATA Cables

There are other kinds of SATA cables that are available which are discussed in the next section.

5. SATA to USB

The SATA to USB cables are very practical in attaching the SSD drives to the motherboard through a USB port. These cables are enabled to extend the storage capacity of the computer or facilitate the data transfer process. These are also to access the internal storage devices easily and separate them from the external drives. Further, they are especially helpful when trying to recover files from faulty PCs or laptops.

6. SATA Bracket

These SATA cables work especially well when you need to expand the connection and want your PC motherboard to work as a dual port. They also help to make the motherboard compatible with the eSATA hard drives.

7. SATA Power

They are referred to as the power interface cables. Generally, these SATA cables are used to attach the power adaptors, splitters and extensions for the data cables and the SATA power.

8. SATA Bridge

They are primarily the SATA interface that bridges the motherboard and the connected devices. These might attach ATA devices to the PCl cards or SATA motherboards.

9. SATA EXPRESS

They are advanced SATA cables with new specifications and are compatible with PCl Express(PCle) and SATA storage devices.

In the following table, we have summarised the several types of SATA cables.