Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives: Today, we will investigate the new SATA drives. This hard drive does not come in the Compaq Presario SR1617CL-B; however, this is one of the technologies that you should be aware of when doing comparison shopping. SATA stands for Serial ATA. SATA is being touted as the next generation replacement for IDE drives (a.k.a ATA, PATA Ultra DMA). The SATA hard drives are designed to deliver 150 Mbytes/sec transfer speed. This gives you a big boost from the 133 Mbytes/sec you get from the best ATA-7 drive commonly referred to as Ultra DMA-133. Surprisingly, the every day performance of the SATA drive has been about the same as the ATA predecessor.

One of the significant technological features is NCQ. NCQ stands for native command queuing. NCQ employs an algorithm called Rotational Position Ordering (RPO) to speed access to the data. I know all this acronym soup sounds