In computer hardware, Serial ATA (SATA or S-ATA) is a computer bus technology primarily designed for transfer of data to and from a hard disk. It is the successor to the legacy Advanced Technology Attachment standard (ATA, also known as IDE). This older technology was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA) to distinguish it from Serial ATA.
SATA 1 (SATA I)
The First Generation of Serial ATA interfaces is also known as SATA 150. This name is given because SATA 1 runs at 1.5 gigahertz. SATA1 has a data transfer rate of 1.2 gigatbits per second.
SATA 2 (SATA II)

The latest SATA technolgy now runs at 3 gigahertz per second. SATA2 is backwards compatable with SATA1 so a SATA 1 hardware interface can be used with a SATA 2 hard drive, and visa versa.
SATA2 is approximately the same price as SATA1. 

An explanation of “dual core” CPU / Processors

One of the latest trends in CPU / processor technology is “dual core” or “multi core” processors. Processors previously designed all sit on one chip, with one core. The core does all the logic and thinking while the “chip” connects the core to the rest of the system and handles the requests, houses the cache (onboard memory), and other logic activities. Dual Core means there is litterally 2 cores sitting on a single chip. Intel was the first to accomplish this feat with the release of the Pentium D series. The Pentium D was labeled by the tech community to be a very inelegant way of implementing dual core as it essentially was 2 Pentium 4 cores slapped together on a single to form Pentium D. This meant that very little was done to optimize the process. AMD soon followed up with its Athlon X2 series which was regarded as a much more elegant and true to purpose Dual Core design.

Dual Core CPU’s usually run slightly lower clockspeeds (per core) then the higher end single core processors. This is generally to help cut costs as well as maintain a safe thermal envelope. Having 2 cores in such close proximity creates significantly more heat and as such, the first dual core processors had significantly lower clockspeeds (per core).

An explanation of DDR versus DDR2

Article Technical Level: Intermediate

RAM: Vendors randomly decide to list their ram speeds based on a “PCXXXX” standard or a MHz standard, they convert based on a formula related to data transfer rates. PC2100 = 266 MHz, PC3200 = 400 MHz, PC4200 = 533 MHz, PC5300 = 667 MHz, PC6400 = 800 MHz. There is of course more divisions inbetween, before, and after but these are the big ones. Something that needs to be considered though is there is also DDR(1) and DDR2. The original DDR has “latency” (time for data to get from one point to another) significantly lower then DDR2. This is sort of like how cache differences work. DDR2 was designed with higher latencies (bad) but higher bandwidth as well (good). DDR(1) generally ends at PC3200 (highest official bandwidth of DDR) and DDR2 generally starts at PC4200. The PC4200 / 533 MHz, again, refers to bandwidth. This is how many megabytes (MB) per second are possible to transfer across the memory bus. Again though, DDR2 has significantly higher latencies so it takes longer for that larger amount of data to get where it’s going. The industry can’t seem to decide on a standard but over the last few years it has migrated to DDR2 due to lower costs. DDR2 also uses less energy as compared to DDR due to higher efficiencies, a smaller manufacturing process and less power intensive design. Very extreme performance nuts still tend to prefer DDR(1) due to its significantly lower latencies.