Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or SATA comes in 3x revisions SATA I SATA II and SATA III.

Max throughput speeds:

SATA I - 1.5GB/s

SATA II - 3GB/s

SATA III - 6GB/s

Check out the info on Wikipeadia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Hard Disk technology has come a long way in speed and capacity.  The latest hard disk drives use SATA interfaces the lastest and fastest use SATA 3 (6Gb/s) interfaces. This latest hard disk technology will give unprecedented performance of Read/Write and will become the new hard drive standard.  SSD disk drives from Future Storage is big SSD news.

Solid State Sata Drives use the same SATA interface that spinning HDD and other SATA devices (CDROM/DVD) use.  The Solid State Drive looks the same as a standard hard drive when installed in you system.  The performance of an SSD will knock socks off the fastest hard disk drive in performance power consumption heat and noise output.  

SSD notebook drives can also use a SATA bus but use a Mini PCI-E connector.  MSata or Micro Sata is a type of mini ssd which is also another hard disk drive format used in some SSD Notebooks.  These also come in a Mini PCI-E connector.  Confusingly the two look identical but mSATA is not compatible with other Mini PCI-E based SATA drives.

1.8 inch SSD is a smaller format drive that is produced by many manufacturers for the Netbook/Laptop models that have this interface.  Some of the manufacturer's (Runcore in particular) supply a USB caddie enabling the owner to use the ssd as an external solid state disk.