Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PC Cables used to be HUGE. Why?”.
Imagine if you looked through your PC’s nice tempered glass side panel and saw these gray lasagna noodle looking cables running all over it. Well, in this imagined scenario that I just inserted into your mind. Those cables are parallel, ATA or PA cables, and if you’ve noticed that this sounds suspiciously similar to the modern SATA interface you’d be correct, as this is what was used to connect storage devices like hard drives and Optical drives before SATA came along released in 1986 p. Originally just called ATA or IDE: they only called it P later. First offered speeds of only 8.3 megab per second, which is absolutely poultry by today’s standards, but speeds increased as the years went on with the fastest versions offering 133 mbes per second, which was enough for most consumer grade hard drives. If you look closely at a p cable, you can see that it’s made up of many smaller wires, either 40 or 80, with newer versions of P using the ladder. This makes sense, considering it’s a parallel interface, as the name indicates.
An interface being parallel means that it sends and receives data multiple bits at a time, instead of just one at a time which is part of the reason P needed so many pins but hold on a second. Do you remember all those old printer cables? They also used a large many pinned connector, but the cable itself was usually a round cable that was Far skinnier than these big big ugly P cables. So why the heck couldn’t they make p cables round to make Cable Management easier? Well, we’ll tell you right after we think the sponsor of this video delete me. Here’S a deal right now. Your personal info is floating around online without your say so, and that’s not cool thankfully delete me is cool and they’re here to get rid of that information. Delete me can save you from scammers blowing up your phone with robocalls and sketchy emails now manually.
Removing all of your accounts from the web is tedious, but delete me. Software and exper Squad can wipe out that info in a jiffy on average they remove over 2,000 pieces of data for customers in their first 2 years. That’S some serious cleanup! So, if you’re, tired of your personal info playing, hide and seek online, go to join delet, me.com tequi and use code techwick for a sweet, 20 % off now here’s the thing there were some round p cables out there that helped with airf flow gave dust a Smaller surface area to collect on and looked a heck of a lot better but more standard P cables were big and ugly for a reason you see, as the P standard evolved to move more and more data at one time. This meant that you had a higher potential for errors, especially as these ribbon cables were unshielded, meaning that electrical interference could increase the likelihood of Errors even more to mitigate this. The P standard used the extra conductors in the 80 wire version as grounds to help prevent cross talk, but also defined a certain length that cables should not exceed 18 in. However, the issue is that when you bunched all these wires together, instead of having them side by side like you would in a ribbon, cable, the potential for interference is even greater and to make matters worse.
These round cables were often larger than the standard 18 in, although the round cables did often work. Okay, the higher error rate meant that some users had to turn down the maximum speed and, aside from these signal, Integrity concerns ribbon cables were quite cheap, meaning there wasn’t much reason for the commodity piece manufacturers of the 1990s to use anything else. This also meant that folding cables so that they didn’t block air flow too much actually became something of an art form among computer enthusiasts of the time, but outside of the ugly cables P had other issues. You could put two drives on the same ribbon: cable, but typically you designate one as device, zero or master and the other as device one or slave aside from the off-putting terminology. Setting this up correctly requires adjusting finicky little jumpers on the back of the drives themselves. As opposed to SATA drives where you just plug them into the header and Away you go, alternatively, you could also use a cable select mode with your paa drives, where the master and slave drives were instead assigned based on a wire hole.
That was punched out on the cable itself. Speaking of SATA, if P was a parallel interface that could send multiple bits at once. Why is SATA faster well having all those parallel signals going down? One data bus presented challenges aside from the interference we already talked about. You also have to split data up at one end and recombine it at the other sata’s serial nature is simpler and less prone to interference, meaning it started to displace p in the mid 2000s, with P drives going out of production around 2013, but you can still Get controller cards to allow you to use your old drive and your sweet new rig just so you can horrify everyone on the battle station subreddit. So there’s that. But the fact you watch to the end of this video is the opposite of horrifying to me.
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