Find out difference between PCI and SATA

PCI

PCI, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect, is a bus found on motherboards. It is a newer and faster than the previous ISA and VESA Local bus. It was invented in 1993 and although many faster alternatives have been introduced, PCI is still being used as one of the most common interfaces. PCI bus is used for attaching large variety of devices to computer such as network cards, TV tuner cards, modems, sound cards, etc. A typical 32-but PCI bus has the capacity of transferring data at the speed of 133 MB/s and a 64-bit PCI bus can transfer data at the rate of 266 MB/s.

Much faster versions of PCI buses are also available, PCI-X and PCI Express for example, which provide and 1GB transfer rate, respectively. Different size of PCI cards can be plugged into a PCI bus. There are full-size cards, which have height of 107mm and a depth of 312mm. However, the modern PCI cards are smaller than this. For example a very commonly used PCI card has 0.6 inches width, 6.9 inches depth and 4.2 inches height. Half-height cards are also available, which usually have height range between 1.42 inches to 2.53 inches and depth range between 4.72 inches to 6.6 inches. The smallest of all PCI cards are known as Mini PCI cards. The standard size of these cards is ¼ of the full-sized cards.

SATA

SATA or Serial Advanced technology advancement is a computer bus, invented in 2003, intended to provide very high speed data transfer rate. SATA offers obliging advantages over its older version – parallel ATA interface. Unlike ATA, reduced bulk of cable is used in SATA devices causing less congestion inside the Desktop. The SATA connector for Desktop has size of 3.5 inches and 2.5 inches for portable computers. SATA bus uses Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), which allows hot plugging (installing and uninstalling of the device without switch off the PC), native command queuing (NCQ) – a technology to increase disk performance under certain situations. Note that Windows XP does not provide driver support for AHCI but the later versions – Vista and Windows 7 as well as Linux do. The most recent SATA specifications allow very high data transfer rate up to 3.0Gbit/sec. The older version of SATA 1.5, which is still in use, provides data rate of 1.5Gbit/sec.

SATA offers limited backward and forward compatibility, which means older SATA versions like PATA remains incompatible but at the application level the older devices can be made to look like SATA devices to OS. And if the motherboard provides the “legacy mode” option, the SATA drives can also be made to like PATA drives to the OS. SATA is also available for external devices. Connector in external devices is called eSATA and in design, it is slightly different than SATA connector.