imagine if you looked through your PC's nice tempered glass side panel and saw
these gray 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 PA 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 released in 1986 p originally just
called ATA or IDE they only called it P later first offered speeds of only 8.3
megab per second which is absolutely poultry by today's standards but speeds
increased as the years went on with the fastest versions offering 133 mbes per
second which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives if you look
closely at a p cable you can see that it's made up of many smaller wires
either 40 or 80 with newer versions of P
using the ladder 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 P needed so many pins
but hold on a second do you remember all those old printer cables they also used
a large many pinned connector but the cable itself was usually a round cable
that was Far skinnier than these big big ugly P cables so why the heck couldn't
they make p cables round to make Cable Management easier well we'll tell you
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tequi and use code techwick for a sweet 20% off now here's the thing there were
some round p cables out there that helped with airf flow gave dust a
smaller surface area to collect on and looked a heck of a lot better but more
standard P cables were big and ugly for
a reason you see as the P 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 P
standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as grounds to help
prevent cross talk but also defined a certain length that cables should not
exceed 18 in 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
in 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 piece manufacturers of the 1990s to use
anything else this also meant that folding cables so that they didn't block
air flow too much actually became something of an art form among computer
enthusiasts of the time but outside of the ugly cables P had other issues you
could put two drives on the same ribbon cable but typically you designate one as
device zero or master and the other as
device one or slave aside from the off-putting terminology setting this up
correctly requires 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
paa 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 P was a
parallel interface that could send multiple bits at once why is SATA faster
well 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 p in the
mid 2000s with P drives going out of production around 2013 but you can still
get controller cards to allow you to use your old drive and your sweet new rig
just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit so there's that
but the fact you watch 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
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