1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,420 Imagine if you looked through your PC's nice tempered glass side panel and saw these grey 2 00:00:05,420 --> 00:00:08,840 lasagna noodle looking cables running all over it. 3 00:00:08,840 --> 00:00:13,240 Well, in this imagined scenario that I just inserted into your mind, those cables are 4 00:00:13,240 --> 00:00:16,400 parallel ATA or PETA cables. 5 00:00:16,400 --> 00:00:21,240 And if you've noticed that this sounds suspiciously similar to the modern SATA interface, you'd 6 00:00:21,240 --> 00:00:25,780 be correct as this is what was used to connect storage devices like hard drives and optical 7 00:00:25,780 --> 00:00:35,040 drives before SATA came along. Based in 1986, PETA, originally just called ATA or IDE, they only called it PETA later, 8 00:00:35,040 --> 00:00:40,840 first offered speeds of only 8.3 megabytes per second, which is absolutely paltry by 9 00:00:40,840 --> 00:00:48,140 today's standards. But speeds increased as the years went on, with the fastest versions offering 133 megabytes 10 00:00:48,140 --> 00:00:52,100 per second, which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives. 11 00:00:52,100 --> 00:00:57,240 If you look closely at a PETA cable, you can see that it's made up of many smaller wires, 12 00:00:57,360 --> 00:01:02,240 either 40 or 80, with newer versions of PETA using the latter. 13 00:01:02,240 --> 00:01:06,960 This makes sense considering it's a parallel interface as the name indicates. 14 00:01:06,960 --> 00:01:11,960 An interface being parallel means that it sends and receives data multiple bits at a 15 00:01:11,960 --> 00:01:17,920 time instead of just one at a time, which is part of the reason PETA needed so many pins. 16 00:01:17,920 --> 00:01:21,520 But hold on a second, do you remember all those old printer cables? 17 00:01:21,520 --> 00:01:27,840 They also used a large mini-pin connector, but the cable itself was usually a round cable 18 00:01:27,840 --> 00:01:31,800 that was far skinnier than these big ugly PETA cables. 19 00:01:31,800 --> 00:01:36,200 So why the heck couldn't they make PETA cables round to make cable management easier? 20 00:01:36,200 --> 00:01:41,160 Here's the thing, there were some round PETA cables out there that helped with airflow, 21 00:01:41,160 --> 00:01:45,640 gave dust a smaller surface area to collect on, and looked a heck of a lot better. 22 00:01:45,640 --> 00:01:50,000 But more standard PETA cables were big and ugly for a reason. 23 00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:55,200 You see, as the PETA standard evolved to move more and more data at one time, this meant 24 00:01:55,200 --> 00:02:00,320 that you had a higher potential for errors, especially as these ribbon cables were unshielded, 25 00:02:00,320 --> 00:02:04,880 meaning that electrical interference could increase the likelihood of errors even more. 26 00:02:04,880 --> 00:02:09,860 To mitigate this, the PETA standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as 27 00:02:09,860 --> 00:02:15,840 grounds to help prevent crosstalk, but also defined a certain length that cables should 28 00:02:15,840 --> 00:02:22,000 not exceed, 18 inches. However, the issue is that when you bunched all these wires together, instead of having 29 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:26,800 them side by side like you would in a ribbon cable, the potential for interference is even 30 00:02:26,800 --> 00:02:32,960 greater. And to make matters worse, these round cables were often larger than the standard 18 inches. 31 00:02:32,960 --> 00:02:38,360 Although the round cables did often work okay, the higher error rate meant that some users 32 00:02:38,360 --> 00:02:41,480 had to turn down the maximum speed. 33 00:02:41,480 --> 00:02:45,520 And aside from these signal integrity concerns, ribbon cables were quite cheap, meaning there 34 00:02:45,520 --> 00:02:51,120 wasn't much reason for the commodity PC manufacturers of the 1990s to use anything else. 35 00:02:51,120 --> 00:02:55,760 This also meant that folding cables so that they didn't block airflow too much actually 36 00:02:55,760 --> 00:03:00,080 became something of an art form among computer enthusiasts of the time. 37 00:03:00,080 --> 00:03:03,600 But outside of the ugly cables, PETA had other issues. 38 00:03:03,600 --> 00:03:08,200 You could put two drives on the same ribbon cable, but typically you'd designate one 39 00:03:08,200 --> 00:03:14,120 as device zero or master, and the other as device one or slave. 40 00:03:14,120 --> 00:03:18,880 And from the off-putting terminology, setting this up correctly required adjusting finicky 41 00:03:18,880 --> 00:03:24,200 little jumpers on the back of the drives themselves, as opposed to SATA drives where you just plug 42 00:03:24,200 --> 00:03:31,360 them into the header and away you go. Alternatively, you could also use a cable select mode with your PETA drives, where the 43 00:03:31,360 --> 00:03:37,520 master and slave drives were instead assigned based on a wire hole that was punched out 44 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:44,760 on the cable itself. Speaking of SATA, if PETA was a parallel interface that could send multiple bits at once, why 45 00:03:44,760 --> 00:03:51,920 is SATA faster? While having all those parallel signals going down one data bus presented challenges. 46 00:03:51,920 --> 00:03:56,120 Aside from the interference we already talked about, you also have to split data up at one 47 00:03:56,120 --> 00:03:59,160 end and recombine it at the other. 48 00:03:59,160 --> 00:04:04,280 SATA's serial nature is simpler and less prone to interference, meaning it started to 49 00:04:04,280 --> 00:04:10,280 displace PETA in the mid-2000s, with PETA drives going out of production around 2013. 50 00:04:10,280 --> 00:04:13,960 But you can still get controller cards to allow you to use your old drive in your sweet 51 00:04:13,960 --> 00:04:18,360 new rig, just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit. 52 00:04:18,360 --> 00:04:23,600 So, there's that. But the fact that you watched to the end of this video is the opposite of horrifying to 53 00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:28,240 me. Thanks for that. Hey, like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, check out our video on 54 00:04:28,240 --> 00:04:32,400 whether SATA will be the next thing to become obsolete, comment below with video suggestions 55 00:04:32,520 --> 00:04:36,520 and don't forget to subscribe and follow. I'll be watching, you better write that comment.