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Why is SATA better than PATA (aka IDE)?

JEDI

JEDI

Lifer
always thought parallel was better than serial?
ie: in the old days, parallel ports > serial ports


edit:
changed faster to better
 
Last edited:
Blain said:
Are you asking about SATA 1.0, SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0?
Are you asking about PATA ATA-1, ATA-2, ATA-3, ATA-4, ATA-5 orATA-6?
Click to expand...

dont know?

just wondering why the industry went from PATA to SATA.
always thought parallel was better than serial?
 
The issue you are seeing has do do with the always concept. Parallel was previously considered better becasue of the idea that serial=1 channel of stuff at a time vs. parallel=many channels of stuff at the same time.

the distinction changed with SATA and then PCIe, as the newer protocol was actually faster despite being defined as a serial type of connection.

(Note that the PCIe type of connection has multiple lanes, i.e. PCIe video cards are typically 16x lanes, so you could actually define this as 16 parallel serial connections... Confusing enough yet??)

I personally don't really care to get all wrapped up in the minutiae, I just check out which works for me and go for that.... 🙂.


<<Did I mess you up by using a video card discussion to explain HDD connections?>>
 
Actually quite a long time back there was a super write up about why the need to go serial. I believe it was presented on Tomshardware. It was a few years ago, but the essence involved issues with stray inductance/capacitance associated with parallel as frequencies increased and components were miniaturized plus parallel connectivity took too much room on the MB to implement and was a cost nuisance involving multi-layered boards.
 
Another advantage of SATA is doing away with Master/Slave designation. That frees us up so we can have several drives or devices - each with a separate channel.
 
Kartajan and C1 have it as I remember. Parallel is faster when all things are the same as more wires, more data for the same speed.

Issues developed in making these systems in that once you start increasing the number of wires (bus size) the cost in time and materials to get it working gets harder/higher. 8 bits was proberly easy, 16 wide was getting tricky. 32 needed a computer to even consider doing it and 64 was looking silly at the board design level.

The issue being that for fast and reliable communications, each of the bus lines need to be of the same length (tricky to design without computer help) and spacing between all lines was best at the same distances (to help with higher speeds). This also lead to needing to share the connection between devices (64 lines from a central device to each individual slot/device was just not viable long term).

So going single dedicated high speed serial has had several advantages to start with. Now though in HDDs, a few more features have been added (like NCQ ect) which help address data internal to the HDD. IDE did have a similar one, TCQ, but IIRC only one drive implemented it (early raptors).

In terms of serial communications on the motherboard, parrell lines are still present, but each line is run independant to the others so removing previus issues and opening up flexabilty for the board designers (ie: GPUs can use upto 16 PCI-E lanes, or can make do with just 1).
 
JEDI said:
always thought parallel was better than serial?
ie: in the old days, parallel ports > serial ports


edit:
changed faster to better
Click to expand...

You were better of when you were asking about which one was faster. Better can have a lot of meanings. Serial connections are "better" because they are simpler. It's easier to make a simple connection go fast than a complex one.

The faster question is just simple math: What's faster, 8 wires that can each transmit 1 b/s or 1 wire that can transmit 10 b/s?
 
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