Proavio is committed to empowering users with leading-edge storage technologies that facilitate, improve and enrich the content creation process. As a leader and developer of next generation storage products, Proavio understands the need for comprehensive technology & product information. This section has been created to help users gain a better understanding of the latest interface & connectivity options available from Proavio.

SATA is the next -generation internal storage interconnect, designed to replace parallel ATA technology. SATA is the proactive evolution of the ATA interface from a parallel bus to a serial bus architecture. This architecture overcomes the electrical constraints that increasrf the difficulty of continued speed enhancements for the classic parallel ATA bus.

Initially SATA was designed as an internal or inside-the-box interface technology, bringing improved performance and new features to internal PC or consumer storage. Creative designers quickly realized the innovative interface could reliably be expanded outside the PC, bringing the same performance and features to external storage needs instead of relying on USB or 1394 interfaces. Called external SATA or eSATA, customers can now utilize shielded cable lengths up to 2 meters outside the PC to take advantage of the benefits the SATA interface brings to storage. SATA is now out of the box as an external standard, with specifically defined cables, connectors, and signal requirements released as new standards in mid-2004. eSATA provides more performance than existing solutions and is hot pluggable.

SATA-II now offers performance as high as 3.0 Gbit/sec per device with the current specification. SATA uses only 4 signal lines, allowing for much more compact (improving internal airflow) cables compared with PATA. It also offers new features such as hot-swapping and native command queuing. There is a special connector (eSATA) specified for external devices, and an optionally implemented provision for clips on internal connectors.

Port multiplier devices are SATA-only based storage products and operate at 3Gb/s per ESATA port. A Port multiplier processor allows a single active host connection to communicate with multiple drives-up to five drives per PM port. They allow easy, cost-effective storage scalability both inside and outside the computer with standard SATA-II drives.

Additional controllers are no longer necessarily needed to expand storage. In-box cabling is greatly simplified with fewer cables attached to more drives. Port multipliers allow significantly higher performance in external storage than either USB 2.0 or Firewire.SATA PM requires that controllers support either command-based switching or FIS (Frame Information Structure)-based switching in order to use port multiplication.