dadiOH said:
So we all have to suffer because of the dodos? Sheesh!
- Smaller and easier to route cables.
- Some mobos have up to 8 SATA ports. Running around 8 SATA cables
inside a computer case is a hell of a lot easier than trying to route
around 8 ribbon cables (whether flat or rolled into a round sleeve).
Imagine the real estate consumed on the motherboard to have 8 IDE
connectors versus the much smaller footprint for 8 SATA ports.
- No headaches with getting the jumpers correctly setup on the hard
disks. Just shove in the disks and connect the cables. Quick
installation. No instruction manual to read. Yes, if you're
masochistic then doing more work is what you want.
- No worry about using cable select and having a ribbon cable that works
with it.
- Better EMF isolation than of a flat exposed ribbon cable.
- Stronger connect between cable and connector to prevent pulling them
apart (since only a few IDE cables come with a pull tab to prevent
users from yanking on the data cable).
- Much smaller cables to eliminate restriction of air flow around them.
Few users, especially those that buy pre-builts, ever bother to note
the airflow and orient the fat ribbon cables to NOT block the
airflow.
- Yes, there are round IDE cables but those are just flat ribbon cables
rolled up inside a sleeve that makes the cable stiffer.
- The SATA connector cannot be reversed when connected but there are
plenty of non-polarized connectors on IDE cables that are in use or
some ahole put a shroud around the hard disk's or mobo's connector
with slots on both sides to de-polarize the connection so a polarized
IDE ribbon cable could still be connected in reverse.
- SATA supports higher bandwidth than IDE ribbon cables. Look at the
[burst mode] specs: ATA-7 drives can go to 133Mbps but SATA I
(surpassed by SATA II and III) started at 150Mbps. Sustained data
rate for SATA drives is higher than for IDE drives.
- IDE ribbon cables come in 40-wire and 80-wire variations (both with
still just the 40 signal wires), and you have to use the 80-wire
variation for ATA-66, and up, devices.
- There's no sharing of the data bandwidth over the cable between
controller and device in SATA as there is with IDE with its 2 devices
(master and slave). In SATA, there's no locking one device during a
write which permits only a concurrent read of the other connected
device with IDE. Each device is separate and writes can be concurrent
on the different devices connected to different SATA controllers.
- PATA uses bidirectional channels (lines) for data to and from the
controller to the device whereas SATA uses separate channels to reduce
noise and impedance. The single-ended signalling for IDE (PATA)
combined data with noise.
- SATA uses lower signal voltage (500mv versus 5V) to minimize the noise
margin and consume less power.
- PATA (IDE) doesn't permit hot-plug capability but SATA does.
- You can get really long IDE cables but incur more ringing and induced
noise whereas the 1-meter length for SATA cables pretty much means you
can use them even in the tall towers without having to drop the drives
down in the external bays for the cables to reach them.
- SATA has more thorough error checking and correcting over the serial
bus than for PATA hence better guarantee of integrity for commands and
data.
- PATA connectors were more secure because they had more pins (40 or 80)
for more friction to prevent accidentally pulling out the connector.
However, you can get locking SATA connectors that have a spring clip
to ensure the connector doesn't get accidentally pulled out.
There are more advantages to SATA over PATA but I'm not that interested
to list them all. So, yes, you'll have to suffer with the advantages of
SATA cabling. Oh poor you.
By the way, it wasn't just the dodo users that misconfigured the PATA
drives regarding polarity of connections or wrong jumper settings or
incorrect placement of devices on the cable connectors or using overly
long ribbon cables or blocking airflow.
