[Eisenstein]

How much of that is because the tech was better versus because it was Intel pushing for it? There were competing standards such as (off the top of my head) SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?), Firewire and PCIx.

[justsomehnguy]

> SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?),

Nope, there is a lot of differences (Wiki would help on the details), most notably is what SATA was designed to be cheap from the start, including the controller complexity; while SCSI demands a quite intelligent controller, which costs more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Comparison_to_other_inter...

[to11mtm]

> SCSI (isn't that what SATA basically is anyway?), Ehh, ever since ATAPI, both old 'IDE' style as well as SATA hosts could use SCSI commands. The speed you get with a SATA cable, wire for wire, is a win over any SCSI cable I've ever seen, let alone the LVD vs HVD and everything else you had to worry about.

>Firewire

arguably had the right ideas at the wrong time; the extra power delivery is something we are finally now seeing in USB. However firewire was still relatively expensive.

> PCIx

PCI-X was still parallel with lots of data lines/etc which can cause it's own problems. Aside from having multiple cards potentially hamming each other up (PCI-Express this is less possible since it's point to point rather than shared lines) there is the challenge of the large number of traces and the difficulty in running them on a board as the signalling frequency scales up.