Hot Swapable Devices SERIAL ATA STANDARDS A consortium of manufacturers, called the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO;

see www.sata-io.org) and led by Intel, developed the serial ATA (SATA) standards. These standards also have the oversight of the T13 Committee. SATA uses a serial data path rather than the traditional parallel data path. (Essentially, the difference between the two is that data is placed on a serial cable one bit following the next, but with parallel cabling, all data in a byte is placed on the cable at one time.) The three major revisions to SATA are summarized in Table 8-2. Serial ATA interfaces are much faster than PATA interfaces and are used by all types of drives, including hard drives, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and tape drives. A motherboard can have two, four, six, or more SATA connectors, which are much easier to configure and use than PATA connectors. SATA supports hot-swapping, also called hot-plugging. With hot-swapping, you can connect and disconnect a drive while the system is running. A SATA drive connects to one internal SATA connector on the motherboard by way of a SATA data cable. An internal SATA data cable can be up to 1 meter in length, has 7 pins, and is much narrower compared to the 40-pin parallel IDE cable (see Figure 8-12). The thin cables dont hinder airflow inside a case as much as the wide parallel ATA cables do. RAID For file servers using RAID 5 that must work continuously and hold important data, it might be practical to use hardware that allows for hard drive hot-swapping, which means you can remove one hard drive and insert another without powering down the computer. However, hard drives that can be hot-swapped cost significantly more than regular hard drives. RAID hard drive arrays are sometimes used as part of a storage area network (SAN). USB Device Even though USB devices are hot-swappable, its not always a good idea to plug or unplug a device while it is turned on. If you do so, especially when using a low-quality USB cable, you can fry the port or the device if wires in the USB connectors touch (creating a short) as you plug or unplug the connectors. Also, to protect the data on a USB storage device, double-click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the notification area (see Figure 9-5) before removing the device. Select the device and click Stop (see Figure 9-6). It is then safe to remove the device. The latest PCMCIA standard is ExpressCard, which uses the PCI Express bus standard or the USB 2.0 standard. Two sizes of ExpressCards exist: ExpressCard/34 is 34mm wide and ExpressCard/54 is 54mm wide. Both of these types of cards are 75mm long and 5mm high. Figure 21-19 compares a CardBus card to each of the two ExpressCard cards. An ExpressCard/34 card can fit into an ExpressCard/54 slot, but not vice versa. ExpressCard slots are not backward compatible with PC Card or CardBus cards. An ExpressCard slot is fully hot-pluggable (add a card while the system is on), hot-swappable (exchange or add a card while the system is on), and supports autoconfiguration, just as does a USB port. Figure 21-20 shows an ExpressCard/54 card that provides two eSATA ports for external SATA drives.