The Ultra ATA or IDE hard drive is found in most entry-level servers, workstations and desktop PCs. Ultra ATA hard drives have a Parallel ATA or PATA interface. Parallel ATA hard drives use a 40-pin data cable and are limited to 133 MB/sec. Serial ATA or SATA hard drives, the evolutionary replacement to Parallel ATA hard drives, have a serial interface. Serial ATA hard drives use a small 7-pin data cable and are available up to 300 MB/sec. Ultra ATA and Serial ATA hard drives, without NCQ (see NCQ below), are best suited for use in single-user environments where multiple simultaneous disk I/O requests do not frequently occur and 24X7 availability is not required.

Many of the latest Serial ATA hard drives now offer Native Command Queuing (NCQ). NCQ intelligently reorders read/write commands to reduce the slow mechanical movements within the drive and allows the host to issue additional commands while the drive is seeking for data for another command, dramatically improving performance. NCQ enables full use of large onboard cache buffers for even greater performance. Consequently by reducing the mechanical movements within the drive wear and tear is reduced and reliability is improved. The addition of NCQ to Serial ATA hard drives is one of the most significant improvements to the ATA family of hard drives since Serial ATA was introduced and a tremendous step in moving ATA technology from entry-level to enterprise.

Although, we offer a huge selection of Serial ATA and Ultra ATA hard drives not every model available is shown here. If you do not see what you are looking for, need help selecting the best drive for your application or just need a better price please let us know. Click here to contact presales support. Don't forget to visit our "Daily Specials" page to see what hard drive specials we might be offering. We also offer a large selection of rugged portable external hard drives and desktop external hard drives with both USB and FireWire / IEEE 1394 interfaces. Click here for more information.

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