Serial vs parallel?

Energize · 21 Jul 2007 at 06:13

I've been told that parallel connections give double the bandwidth of serial connections eg sata, usb. which makes sense. Does that mean in the future we will see the return of parallel connections like pata?

Nebzor · 21 Jul 2007 at 06:28

Energize said:
I've been told that parallel connections give double the bandwidth of serial connections eg sata, usb. which makes sense. Does that mean in the future we will see the return of parallel connections like pata?

Yes, but parallel connections simply are not as effective as serial connections. Currently, the SATA connections are faster than PATA (150MB/s or 300MB/s as opposed to ATA-7/8's 133MB/s.) You also don't have to deal with crosstalk, signal skew, or the processing overhead (caused by arranging bytes into bits and sending each to the appropriate wire) with SATA, which further increases is speed over PATA.

Edit to clarify: I don't think we'll be switching back to parallel connections any time soon.

Energize · 21 Jul 2007 at 06:38

Can't the pata controller do that instead of the cpu?

Nebzor · 21 Jul 2007 at 06:39

Sorry, it was a typing error, meant to write processing