one very common interface type for our storage devices inside of our laptop computers and desktop computers is sata sata stands for serial at attachment and there have been many different sata versions throughout the years the first version of sata sata revision 1.0 transferred data at one and a half gigabits per second over a one meter cable saturation 2.0 doubled that speed to three gigabits per second version 3.0 doubled it again to 6 gigabits per second and sata revision 3.2 increased the speed to 16 gigabits per second over that one meter data cable inside of your computer sata is used exclusively inside of our computers if you have an external storage device you're probably connecting with esata or external sata this matches the speeds that are used on those revisions of internal sata versions but it allows for a maximum cable length of 2 meters these are the sata connectors on a hard drive this smaller 7-pin connector is used for data transfer and this larger 15-pin connector is used to power the device this hard drive also has a power connector for a molex connector so if you're transitioning a system to a newer sata drive but it still has an older power supply you can use the older molex connection or if your power supply supports it the newer 15-pin sata connection these connections for power and for data are one-to-one connections so you have a single power connection coming off of your power supply that single connection plugs into that single connector on the back of your storage drive you also have a single data connector on your motherboard that single data connector provides a single connection for a storage device using that data connector unlike some previous storage types a sata connection has a single cable supporting a single storage device here's a motherboard this one has a cpu and space for memory and you can see down here at the bottom are some sata connectors if we zoom up on this you can see that we have sata revision 2 and sata revision 3 interfaces and these also have different colors to designate the difference between the versions the colors can change depending on the motherboard this motherboard has yellow sata connectors and it's a pair of sata connectors that are next to each other these sata connections go directly from the motherboard into the storage device itself you can see we have three separate motherboard connections and the black yellow and blue cables are plugging into the black yellow and blue connectors on these three separate storage drives for these storage drives to work you would also obviously need to connect the power connections for each of these three drives here's another storage drive this one does not have that molex connector so the only way to power this drive is with the sata power that's included on the drive itself and you would also connect the data connection to your motherboard you usually have that cable coming directly from the motherboard plugging into the drive and now you're able to access all of the data on the drive once you add both the data and the power connection to this storage device as we mentioned earlier there's not only this internal connection for sata there's also an external version called esata and on this device there is an esata adapter card with two separate external sata links built into the computer itself these use the same standard for connectivity that we have with our internal sata connections but the connector itself although looks physically similar to the internal connector is a very different connector type when you're using esata if we look at a sat interface on your motherboard it has this l shape associated with it if we look at an external esata connector it's slightly larger and does have a very different layout this means that if you're connecting an esata drive you'll need an esata cable and if you're plugging into an internal sata drive you will need a sata cable many storage drives have different options for connectivity this external storage drive has firewire usb2 and esata as some of those options if you're using that esata connection you would plug in to the storage drive connect that esata cable to the esata interface on your computer and now you'll be able to transfer data from this external storage device you