Serial ATA (SATA) refers to a type of connector cable that is used to attach components, like hard drives, to a motherboard. A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of storage drive that allows for very fast read and write speeds. Comparing the drive type with a type of connector cable does not really make sense. It is more accurate to compare traditional hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs or SAS cables to SATA cables.

Comparison chart

SATA versus SSD comparison chart
Edit this comparison chartSATASSD
Speed Data transfers at the rate of up to 6 Gb/s SSD is faster. SSD has lower latency, faster read/writes, and supports more IOPs (input output operations per second) compared to HDD.

Speed

Most SSDs have the potential to read and write data at speeds of 300-500MB/s or better. How well SATA-based SSDs perform, though, can depend on the version of SATA cable in use. There are multiple versions of SATA — SATA revision 1, 2, 3, 3.1, and 3.2 — with each new version of the cable allowing for faster data transfer rates. Earlier SATA revisions will not always be capable of transferring data quickly enough to take advantage of an SSD's faster read and write speeds. As such, a SATA-III cable is recommended for SSDs because SATA-III is capable of transferring data at about 600MB/s.

References

About the Author

Nick Jasuja

Nick Jasuja has over 15 years of technology industry experience, including at Amazon in Seattle. He is an expert at building websites, developing software programs in PHP and JavaScript, maintaining MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and running Linux servers for serving high-traffic websites. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science & Engineering.

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"SATA vs SSD." Diffen.com. Diffen LLC, n.d. Web. 9 Sep 2025. < >