WEBVTT

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imagine if you looked through your PC's nice tempered glass side panel and saw

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these gray lasagna noodle looking cables running all over it well in this

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imagined scenario that I just inserted into your mind those cables are parallel

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ATA or PA cables and if you've noticed that this sounds suspiciously similar to

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the modern SATA interface you'd be correct as this is what was used to

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connect storage devices like hard drives and Optical drives before SATA came

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along released in 1986 p originally just

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called ATA or IDE they only called it P later first offered speeds of only 8.3

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megab per second which is absolutely poultry by today's standards but speeds

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increased as the years went on with the fastest versions offering 133 mbes per

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second which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives if you look

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closely at a p cable you can see that it's made up of many smaller wires

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either 40 or 80 with newer versions of P

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using the ladder this makes sense considering it's a parallel interface as

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the name indicates an interface being parallel means that it sends and

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receives data multiple bits at a time instead of just one at a time which is

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part of the reason P needed so many pins

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but hold on a second do you remember all those old printer cables they also used

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a large many pinned connector but the cable itself was usually a round cable

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that was Far skinnier than these big big ugly P cables so why the heck couldn't

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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

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some round p cables out there that helped with airf flow gave dust a

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smaller surface area to collect on and looked a heck of a lot better but more

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standard P cables were big and ugly for

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a reason you see as the P standard evolved to move more and more data at

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one time this meant that you had a higher potential for errors especially

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as these ribbon cables were unshielded meaning that electrical interference

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could increase the likelihood of Errors even more to mitigate this the P

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standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as grounds to help

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prevent cross talk but also defined a certain length that cables should not

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exceed 18 in however the issue is that when you

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bunched all these wires together instead of having them side by side like you

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would in a ribbon cable the potential for interference is even greater and to

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make matters worse these round cables were often larger than the standard 18

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in although the round cables did often work okay the higher error rate meant

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that some users had to turn down the maximum speed and aside from these

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signal Integrity concerns ribbon cables were quite cheap meaning there wasn't

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much reason for the commodity piece manufacturers of the 1990s to use

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anything else this also meant that folding cables so that they didn't block

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air flow too much actually became something of an art form among computer

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enthusiasts of the time but outside of the ugly cables P had other issues you

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could put two drives on the same ribbon cable but typically you designate one as

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device zero or master and the other as

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device one or slave aside from the off-putting terminology setting this up

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correctly requires adjusting finicky little jumpers on the back of the drives

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themselves as opposed to SATA drives where you just plug them into the header

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and Away you go alternatively you could also use a cable select mode with your

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paa drives where the master and slave

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drives were instead assigned based on a wire hole that was punched out on the

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cable itself speaking of SATA if P was a

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parallel interface that could send multiple bits at once why is SATA faster

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well having all those parallel signals going down one data bus presented

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challenges aside from the interference we already talked about you also have to

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split data up at one end and recombine it at the other SATA's serial nature is

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simpler and less prone to interference meaning it started to displace p in the

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mid 2000s with P drives going out of production around 2013 but you can still

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get controller cards to allow you to use your old drive and your sweet new rig

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just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit so there's that

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but the fact you watch to the end of this video is the opposite of horrifying

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to me thanks for that hey like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it

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check out our video on whether SATA will be the next thing to become obsolete

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comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow

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I'll be watching you better write that comment okay