A viewer on one of my Anet Computers’ YouTube channel video asked me a question about Serial AT Attachment.
Which sata connection should optical drive be connected to? should it be #4?
Donald Hxxxx
Serial AT Attachment replaced the older school Parallel AT Attachment. Integrated Drive Electronics like optical drives and hard disks used the Parallel AT Attachment. To give a short answer to this question, it does not matter what SATA connector on motherboard he plugs his optical drive into.
As of this blog post creation 16x blu ray optical discs have a maximum read/write speed of 576 Mbits per second five hundre megabits per second. The first three SATA types one, two, and three have following speeds.
* SATA 1 1.5 Gigabits per second
* SATA 2 3.0 Gigabits per second
* SATA 3 6.0 Gigabits per second
Some motherboards come with different SATA types. Some motheboards come with just one type of SATA connection type. These SATA connector on motherboard are sometimes color coded, if they have different types of SATA connections.
Since he was asking about an optical drive than most likely he won’t need to worry about speed. Also, when NOT taking into account speed issues, SATA technology does not require that you hook up devices in sequential order. Back in the day with PATA or IDE devices you had to connect those devices in a specific order and or use jumpers to tell the BIOS which devices to boot from.
That was once called master and slave. Now, with SATA you only need to worry about this if using different ports that run at different speeds. You can also specify in the Basic Input Output System your boot order, without meddling with cables and jumpers.
I guess you could plug in your SATA devices in a specific order so that you remember what devices are which, perhaps when dual booting operating systems? Other than that which specific SATA connector on Motherboard you choose, only matters when like I stipulated before you have differen generations of SATA types. This would be important if for instance you are going to install a Solid State Drive.
Solid State Drives support different types of SATA technology. These drives have a maximum read/write speed that those SATA connector on motherboard may not support.