Serial ATA (or SATA) has been designed as a replacement for the existing 40 way IDE cable, the SATA connector and cable are smaller (which improves air circulation), with a reduced operating voltage and pin amount (7 as opposed to 40), the current data transfer rate is ATA-150 (1.5Gbps).
Each connected SATA device or conversion needs it's own cable, this removes the old master/ slave set-up and allows for improved data transmission and access speed.

The SATA PCI Cards are compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 specifications to upgrade your desktop computer to allow Dual Serial ATA RAID Channels and one Parallel ATA (IDE) Host controller to support up to two devices.The PCI Cards provide two fully compliant Serial ATA ports to access Striping (RAID 0) and Mirroring (RAID 1) are supported to improve data performance and provide data redundancy.