The Essential Guide to Serial ATA and SATA Express

Used in laptop and desktop computers, low-end servers, and mobile devices, Serial ATA (Advance Technology Attachment), or SATA, is the pervasive disk storage technology in use today. SATA has also penetrated the enterprise computing environment by adding hardware components for fail-over, extending command processing capabilities, and increasing device performance and link speeds. If you work in a data center or manage your company’s storage resources, you will likely encounter storage solutions that require SATA software or hardware.

In this book, leading storage networking technologist David Deming presents a comprehensive guide to designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting any SATA or SATA Express (SATAe) storage solution. Written by an engineer, this book is for those who aren't afraid of digging into the technical details. It explains how SATA/SATAe powers data center applications and how it influences and interacts with all protocol layers and system components.

This book covers all of the tasks associated with installing, configuring, and managing SATA/SATAe storage applications. If you are a test engineer, design engineer, system architect, or even a technically skilled gamer who likes to build your own systems, this book will answer your technical questions about SATA/SATAe. With this book, you should have everything you need to implement a SATA or SATAe storage solution.

David Deming is the president and chief technologist of Solution Technology. With a degree in electronics engineering and more than two decades of industry experience, David has designed many courses covering a wide range of storage and networking technologies. David’s organization is the industry’s leading supplier of storage technology education, and David has personally trained over 50,000 engineers worldwide. David has authored over a dozen storage technology-related publications and is an expert instructional designer. He has assisted many companies with detailed job and task analysis, resulting in high-stakes certification programs and curriculum.

David is an active member of numerous industry associations and committees. In the early stages of Fibre Channel technology, David organized and coordinated the efforts of the Interoperability Testing Program for the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). As interoperability program chair, David played a major role in organizing competing switch vendor efforts to create the first ever FC switch interoperability demonstration. This technology accomplishment was the centerpiece of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Technology Center grand opening in Colorado Springs, Colorado. David also authorized the SANmark program, which became the cornerstone test cases developed and administered by the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL).

David architected and designed the first-ever multi-vendor (heterogeneous) Fibre Channel SAN featured in Computer Technology Review, and he coordinated the industry’s first and largest Interoperability Lab demonstration for Storage Networking World. David has been a voting member of the NCITS T11 Fibre Channel standards committee and has served on T10 (SCSI & SAS) and T10.1 (SSA) standards committees. He is a founder and active member of the SNIA Education Committee and Certification Task Force for which, i