
16 The Essential Guide to Serial ATA and SATA Express
1.5.1 SATA Connectivity
The SATA environment is a point-to-point connection scheme with very limited connectivity. SATA
standards do not define switches or other hardware mechanisms that allow the architecture to go
beyond a single device to host connection. In fact, as mentioned above, the original ATA architecture
components are emulated in a SATA environment so that a two device to host connection scheme can
be realized. SATA-IO realized these connectivity issues early on, and in the Serial ATA Specifications,
they developed special hardware to provide both connectivity and availabil