SATA

SATA 3.2

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) which is engaged in development and promotion of Serial ATA (SATA) technology, announced in the summer of 2013 the approval of the new version of the SATA 3.2 specification. The most important innovation of this version is inclusion of support of the SATA Express standard which connects together the SATA and PCI Express interfaces, providing capacity to 16 Gbps while the existing SATA 3 standard allows to transfer data with speed of 6 Gbps. Thanks to implementation of SATA Express it will be possible to create solid and hybrid state drives, highly productive and effective in terms of costs.

SATA Express can use in the work two PCI Express 3.0 lines at connection of fast solid state drives or SATA of 6 Gbps during the work with slower devices. If earlier the slot of PCI Express intended mainly for installation of video cards, expansion cards and SSD with maximum capacity, then now with the consolidation SATA and PCIe its functionality extends.

The form factor of M.2 developed for the drives used in ultrathin notebooks and tablets is fixed in SATA 3.2. Earlier it was known under the designation NGFF. Besides, audit 3.2 includes the microSSD standard which will allow to create the single-housing built-in drives with the SATA interface, and the Universal Storage Module (USM) specification describing the replaceable and expanded drives for devices of consumer electronics is supplemented with the description of modules of the reduced USM Slim thickness.

The DevSleep function to allow during idle times in work almost completely to switch off disks, minimizing their energy consumption, and almost instantly to recover their full functioning. Among other innovations — the Transitional Energy Reporting function which gives a host detailed information on the device with the SATA interface that allows to improve power management; the Hybrid Information function providing the mechanism through which the host can transmit to the hybrid drive information on caching for the purpose of performance improvement of SSHD and also the Rebuild Assist function accelerating process of data recovery in arrays of RAID.