Re: Maxtor ships multimedia-friendly drive

Yes, I agree. One of the problems with parallel signaling is the need
for all of the receiving pins to achieve the correct condition (eg.:
high or low) at the same time. The individual signal lines are
physically separated, thus, one would expect the propagation times to be
slightly different. At the pedestrian speeds of years gone by, this
slight difference did not matter.

Additionally, the transmission line used, a flat, multiconductor cable,
is fine at pedestrian speeds, but as the wave length of the signal
approaches the length of the transmission line, really nasty things
begin to happen. Consider the changes in telephone drop line. The old
stuff had each pair twisted in a lazy spiral. Cat 5 cable has a visibly
tighter twist to each pair. This is just plain old transmission theory.

Conclusion: it is easier to have one signal path designed for a wide
bandwidth (think high speed) than it is to have multiple signal paths
designed for synchronous operation.

<steps down from podium>

=:-)}}}

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 10:36:50AM -0800, Joshua Kugler wrote:
> I believe the reason they went with serial is that when you pump up the speeds
> that high, paralle gets a lot of crosstalk. That's the reason ATA133 drives
> needed 80 conductor cables, even though they only used 40: it provided a
> layer of shielding. So, not that's it's serial, the frequencies can be
> bumped up higher. Anyone care to correct me?
>
> j----- k-----
>
> On Wednesday 18 August 2004 10:24 am, Thomison, Lee wrote:
> > So does this SATA thing finally give IDE multi-tasking like SCSI has?
> >
> > My other stupid question: if it can 400MB/s (or whatever it is) over a
> > serial line, wouldn't they get even faster speeds if they did it in
> > parallel?
> >
> >
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> --
> Joshua Kugler
> Assistant Systems Administrator
> UAF Department of Mathematical Sciences
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