WEBVTT 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 00:00:05.420 --> 00:00:08.840 lasagna noodle looking cables running all over it. 00:00:08.840 --> 00:00:13.240 Well, in this imagined scenario that I just inserted into your mind, those cables are 00:00:13.240 --> 00:00:16.400 parallel ATA or PETA cables. 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 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 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, 00:00:35.040 --> 00:00:40.840 first offered speeds of only 8.3 megabytes per second, which is absolutely paltry by 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 00:00:48.140 --> 00:00:52.100 per second, which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives. 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, 00:00:57.360 --> 00:01:02.240 either 40 or 80, with newer versions of PETA using the latter. 00:01:02.240 --> 00:01:06.960 This makes sense considering it's a parallel interface as the name indicates. 00:01:06.960 --> 00:01:11.960 An interface being parallel means that it sends and receives data multiple bits at a 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. 00:01:17.920 --> 00:01:21.520 But hold on a second, do you remember all those old printer cables? 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 00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:31.800 that was far skinnier than these big ugly PETA cables. 00:01:31.800 --> 00:01:36.200 So why the heck couldn't they make PETA cables round to make cable management easier? 00:01:36.200 --> 00:01:41.160 Here's the thing, there were some round PETA cables out there that helped with airflow, 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. 00:01:45.640 --> 00:01:50.000 But more standard PETA cables were big and ugly for a reason. 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 00:01:55.200 --> 00:02:00.320 that you had a higher potential for errors, especially as these ribbon cables were unshielded, 00:02:00.320 --> 00:02:04.880 meaning that electrical interference could increase the likelihood of errors even more. 00:02:04.880 --> 00:02:09.860 To mitigate this, the PETA standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as 00:02:09.860 --> 00:02:15.840 grounds to help prevent crosstalk, but also defined a certain length that cables should 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 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 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. 00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:38.360 Although the round cables did often work okay, the higher error rate meant that some users 00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:41.480 had to turn down the maximum speed. 00:02:41.480 --> 00:02:45.520 And aside from these signal integrity concerns, ribbon cables were quite cheap, meaning there 00:02:45.520 --> 00:02:51.120 wasn't much reason for the commodity PC manufacturers of the 1990s to use anything else. 00:02:51.120 --> 00:02:55.760 This also meant that folding cables so that they didn't block airflow too much actually 00:02:55.760 --> 00:03:00.080 became something of an art form among computer enthusiasts of the time. 00:03:00.080 --> 00:03:03.600 But outside of the ugly cables, PETA had other issues. 00:03:03.600 --> 00:03:08.200 You could put two drives on the same ribbon cable, but typically you'd designate one 00:03:08.200 --> 00:03:14.120 as device zero or master, and the other as device one or slave. 00:03:14.120 --> 00:03:18.880 And from the off-putting terminology, setting this up correctly required adjusting finicky 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 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 00:03:31.360 --> 00:03:37.520 master and slave drives were instead assigned based on a wire hole that was punched out 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 00:03:44.760 --> 00:03:51.920 is SATA faster? While having all those parallel signals going down one data bus presented challenges. 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 00:03:56.120 --> 00:03:59.160 end and recombine it at the other. 00:03:59.160 --> 00:04:04.280 SATA's serial nature is simpler and less prone to interference, meaning it started to 00:04:04.280 --> 00:04:10.280 displace PETA in the mid-2000s, with PETA drives going out of production around 2013. 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 00:04:13.960 --> 00:04:18.360 new rig, just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit. 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 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 00:04:28.240 --> 00:04:32.400 whether SATA will be the next thing to become obsolete, comment below with video suggestions 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.