Imagine if you looked through your PC's nice tempered glass side panel and saw these grey
lasagna noodle looking cables running all over it.
Well, in this imagined scenario that I just inserted into your mind, those cables are
parallel ATA or PETA cables.
And if you've noticed that this sounds suspiciously similar to the modern SATA interface, you'd
be correct as this is what was used to connect storage devices like hard drives and optical
drives before SATA came along. Based in 1986, PETA, originally just called ATA or IDE, they only called it PETA later,
first offered speeds of only 8.3 megabytes per second, which is absolutely paltry by
today's standards. But speeds increased as the years went on, with the fastest versions offering 133 megabytes
per second, which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives.
If you look closely at a PETA cable, you can see that it's made up of many smaller wires,
either 40 or 80, with newer versions of PETA using the latter.
This makes sense considering it's a parallel interface as the name indicates.
An interface being parallel means that it sends and receives data multiple bits at a
time instead of just one at a time, which is part of the reason PETA needed so many pins.
But hold on a second, do you remember all those old printer cables?
They also used a large mini-pin connector, but the cable itself was usually a round cable
that was far skinnier than these big ugly PETA cables.
So why the heck couldn't they make PETA cables round to make cable management easier?
Here's the thing, there were some round PETA cables out there that helped with airflow,
gave dust a smaller surface area to collect on, and looked a heck of a lot better.
But more standard PETA cables were big and ugly for a reason.
You see, as the PETA standard evolved to move more and more data at one time, this meant
that you had a higher potential for errors, especially as these ribbon cables were unshielded,
meaning that electrical interference could increase the likelihood of errors even more.
To mitigate this, the PETA standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as
grounds to help prevent crosstalk, but also defined a certain length that cables should
not exceed, 18 inches. However, the issue is that when you bunched all these wires together, instead of having
them side by side like you would in a ribbon cable, the potential for interference is even
greater. And to make matters worse, these round cables were often larger than the standard 18 inches.
Although the round cables did often work okay, the higher error rate meant that some users
had to turn down the maximum speed.
And aside from these signal integrity concerns, ribbon cables were quite cheap, meaning there
wasn't much reason for the commodity PC manufacturers of the 1990s to use anything else.
This also meant that folding cables so that they didn't block airflow too much actually
became something of an art form among computer enthusiasts of the time.
But outside of the ugly cables, PETA had other issues.
You could put two drives on the same ribbon cable, but typically you'd designate one
as device zero or master, and the other as device one or slave.
And from the off-putting terminology, setting this up correctly required adjusting finicky
little jumpers on the back of the drives themselves, as opposed to SATA drives where you just plug
them into the header and away you go. Alternatively, you could also use a cable select mode with your PETA drives, where the
master and slave drives were instead assigned based on a wire hole that was punched out
on the cable itself. Speaking of SATA, if PETA was a parallel interface that could send multiple bits at once, why
is SATA faster? While having all those parallel signals going down one data bus presented challenges.
Aside from the interference we already talked about, you also have to split data up at one
end and recombine it at the other.
SATA's serial nature is simpler and less prone to interference, meaning it started to
displace PETA in the mid-2000s, with PETA drives going out of production around 2013.
But you can still get controller cards to allow you to use your old drive in your sweet
new rig, just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit.
So, there's that. But the fact that you watched to the end of this video is the opposite of horrifying to
me. Thanks for that. Hey, like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, check out our video on
whether SATA will be the next thing to become obsolete, comment below with video suggestions
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