PATA & SATA Question

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rhym1n

rhym1n

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Jan 15, 2014
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I'm either misinformed or haven't been educated enough to understand why SATA is faster than PATA. I remember reading that parallel was faster because it transmits several bits at a time, while serial transmits in a line, 1 at a time.

So how is it that Serial ATA is now faster than Parallel ATA?
 
Solution
hunter315
When you do parallel you have a lot of wires, a lot of traces, and synchronicity issues as speed increase. You have to make sure that all of the data bits arrive as a group, this is easy to do when traveling slowly but gets very difficult as the spacing between successive messages gets decreased. Serial has a pair of wires for differential transmit and a pair for differential receive, there is no waiting or synchronization involved, you don't have mixed up messages you can just ram them down the pipe as fast as you want and you know it will be received in the right order at the far end.

In the end SATA was able to increase in speed with limited engineering effort while the layout of PATA would have required a lot of work on the...
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rhym1n

rhym1n

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Jan 15, 2014
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Thank you, but that doesn't explain how old serial was overtaken by parallel, but then revived. I get that the technology has to be much different than the ancient serial, but how is new serial now better. Is there an article that describes the evolution of serial? I have found a bunch of articles describing the differences between SATA and PATA, but not what I mentioned.
 
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hunter315

hunter315

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When you do parallel you have a lot of wires, a lot of traces, and synchronicity issues as speed increase. You have to make sure that all of the data bits arrive as a group, this is easy to do when traveling slowly but gets very difficult as the spacing between successive messages gets decreased. Serial has a pair of wires for differential transmit and a pair for differential receive, there is no waiting or synchronization involved, you don't have mixed up messages you can just ram them down the pipe as fast as you want and you know it will be received in the right order at the far end.

In the end SATA was able to increase in speed with limited engineering effort while the layout of PATA would have required a lot of work on the synchronicity for each speed boost.

The fastest technologies tend to be a combination of serial and parallel decisions, PCI-e is a collection of serial links that run in parallel, so each one can ram data down its pipe as fast as possible and multiples get used to boost the bandwidth, but since they are all carrying different bytes they don't have to be synchronized unlike PATA with its 16 wires each carrying a different bit in the 16 bit word.
 
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rhym1n

rhym1n

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Absolutely. I've had people tell me that actually teaching can sometimes be a better learning experience than being a student as it requires you to remember everything and make sure you give out correct information as you said. This is also why I would like to start answering questions on this forum and possibly another.

Obviously I would have to start out at more basic topics than this, but you have to start somewhere. I am experienced in a few IT related areas and think Internet forums are an amazing way to learn. Do you have any recommendations on where to start or even another site I could do this on besides tomshardware? I think geekstogo is a great site as well but not as popular as this. Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
 
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