The players and the market
The Players
A large chunk of SATA capable motherboards will feature a chip from Silicon Image. They also produce add-in cards, so this is a name you can expect to see when talking about SATA. Other companies producing SATA chips for motherboards and add-in cards include Highpoint and Promise. Most of these solutions also support RAID, with companies like 3ware, LSI, Supermicro and Netcell also offering SATA RAID solutions.
NVIDIA's nForce 4 chipset features a 3Gbps SATA controller with four SATA channels. Various motherboards based on the nForce 4 have even more SATA channels, made possible by a chip from one of the above comapanies.
The Market
SATA is slowly phasing out PATA drives, although the first generation of SATA drives in general offer little performance difference over their PATA counterparts. However, the price between PATA and SATA drives continues to shrink, encouraging users with a SATA capable system to make the change. With the advent of technologies such as NCQ and the SATA II standard, moving from PATA to SATA will have more appeal as SATA drives begin demonstrate an increasing performance advantage.
The vast majority of new motherboards feature SATA capabilities, which means that many users upgrading their storage at the same time are opting to use a SATA drive, often for the cabling convenience. Slowly, but surely, PATA is being replaced by SATA for us all to reap the benefits.
