The Serial ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) International Organization announced on Wednesday a new trick that will come in just a few months for the popular SATA disk drives. The organization said that thanks to a new specification aiming to eliminate a separate power connection the SATA drives would soon become smarter than ever!

The new specification is called Power Over eSATA and should be ready by the second half of the current year. According to Serial ATA International Organization’s president, Knut Grimsrud, products based on the brand new specification would become available shortly after.

The specification will eliminate SATA external hard disk drives and SATA optical disk drives’ need to use an external power source; the disk drives will use instead a brand new Power Over eSATA cable and thus, will gain power directly from the host system. Thanks to this new improvement, users will expand storage capacity and access stored data more easily, taking into account that wall-plug outlets would not be required anymore.

According to Knut Grimsrud, the Power Over eSATA specification is jointly created by Hitachi, Intel and other disk drive makers, along with cable assembly and laptop makers.