On Fri, 22 May 2009 10:06:59 -0500, "Tim Williams"
wrote:

wrote in message
.. .
Now we're seeing a push towards SATA over PATA. Although a hard drive
is a serial device, and a PATA signal has to be serialized to write to
the hard drive, I don't see what's being accomplished by converting to
SATA. Again, the only real advantage is a skinnier cable and the
ability to hot-plug the units.

See also: PCI-E. Supposedly, at insane data rates (real circuit bandwidth
1GHz), even if signal quality can be managed, propagation skew between bus
lines is ever more difficult (have you seen all the squiggles on a
motherboard between processor, northbridge and RAM?). So why not skip bus
width altogether, crank the clock rate (pushing circuit bandwidth even more
though), and use multiple asynchronous channels. The advantage lies in
clocking each stream at its own rate, rather than clocking 32 or 64 bits at
an identical rate. Bytes could arrive out-of-order, but buffering done
on-chip is a lot faster than a maze of wires on-board.

Tim

This 'reflects' proper avenues as clock rates climb (a little data
transfer joke there). Definitely the right way. Managing little capture
buffers is far better than managing errant data. I'll bet that serial
allows one to downsize error correction overhead as well... or
could/should anyway.