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Nobody who has ever worked with the parallel ribbon cables has not cursed about the connectors, broken fingernails and bent pins as well as simple cuts from trying to connect the drive in a crowded environment are probably the most under-represented reasons for the move to a new interface.

Schematic drawing of the data connector on cable and device (or board). There is only one way to insert the cable and regardless of whether it is done fast or slow, the ground connectors will always touch first and establish electrostatic equilibrium across the board.

The new SATA connectors have a number of little devils in the detail that make them much more than meets the eye. First of all, the connectors are keyed so there is no possibility to accidentally reverse the cables, input will always connect to output and vice versa but that is only the beginning. The SATA interface uses what is called a staggered pin design, meaning that there are two different lengths of pin used, long and short ones. All in all, this offers a total of three different combinations, i.e., long on long, long on short and short on short. Since the way of plugging the cable into the device is always the same, this can be used to generate a temporal sequence of connectivity, that is, the long on long pins always connect first, followed by the long on short and the short on short pins are always going to be the last connections closed.

The biggest foe of any hot plugging scheme of electronic components is electrostatic discharge which can effectively zap any device into oblivion. The countermeasure is usually grounding and as simple as it appears, the idea to use long on long pin conections for grounding both devices is nothing short of brilliant since these connections will always be shorted eons (in electron years) before the data and power wires connect.

In other words, whenever a drive is connected to a receiver, the first thing that is established is the electrostatic equilibrium necessary to protect the data lines. As soon as power is established, the drive will be able to run through its initialization sequence and establish a handshake with the host. The real beauty is that this can be accomplished without power-down of the host, in other words, we have hot swap capabilities and it is all made possible through an extra mm of copper.

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