can anyone clearify me with the basic difference between SATA , PATA, and other HDD types. as we read, this acronyms just becomes a word that mean nothing till we are clear.
PATA is the old ATA hd's using those flat ribbon cables of 40 pins, in the old days they used 2 cables 1 for data and the other for commands and made it into a single cable called ATA IDE when they put th drive controller on the HD itself. SCSI already has the controller on the HD and uses command quing which makes it much faster than IDE hd's as well as being able to have 7 devices on a single cable or 14 in wide scsi or more with fiber channel and other scsi types. SATA is the same as PATA except it uses serial cable. It seems they can use serial cables to transfer data much faster than parallel cables. Kinda strange since parallel cables you transfer 8 or 16 bits at a time while in serial you only transfer 1 bit at a time. But IEEE 1394 firewire was developed by apple and used to be the fastest tranfer rate at the time using a serial cable hence a much smaller cable. You cant have a 40 wire extension cord since it would be huge.. USB like IEEE is almost the same. USB2 is 400 MHZ while IEEE is 480. PCE-E also uses serial transfer modes unlike PCI which is parallel. By using serial you can have more devices since they all use command quing and such addressing to address devices. This was not possible in the old days since you need a cpu in the device for it.
So in essence it is like saying Serial is faster than parallel. IE transfering 1 bit at a time is faster than transfering 8 bits at a time. In the real world it all has to do with cross talk where each wire causes problems in the wire next to it. The faster you send data the easier for data to get corrupted. Also easier to break 1 wire in an 8 wire connector than a 1 wire connector and this was a MAJOR major problem in PATA drives. Especially in ATA 100-133 connectors which used silver or other high performance cables in the connector, bending the cable was enough to break a few of the wires. By using serial, they can use 2-3 wires twisted into each other making it harder to break.
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