The Coming of Serial ATA
GrendelT writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of the newest Serial ATA gadgets that are soon to hit the market. With speeds of 150Mb/s, thinner and longer cables, backwards compatibilty with Parallel ATA (what most of us have right now), and the option of being hot-pluggable, it seems the next step in storage technology is upon us."
But a very important design point in serial ATA is that it is completely backwards compatible with parallel ATA. No software need change. This is not the case if we were to drop *ATA in favor of firewire. Now you can upgrade at your leasure, and mix and match (convertors exist to plug your old drives onto a serialATA cable).