Hi,

I heard that parellel communication is faster than serial communication, but in the case of SATA(600 MB/sec) ,its speed is very much faster than PATA(133MB/sec).What may be the reason for this????????????.Please do reply.


Regards,
Praveen.

Over time, all technologies generally get faster as we learn more about the limits of electronics and make breakthroughs in the realm of what is possible. Whenever you compare two competing alternative technologies, you must take into consideration the history of development of each technology and how mature the current state-of-the-art might be. Often, competing technologies leap-frog each other, because the newest release in one technology out-performs the previous release in the other technology. Such temporary advantages obviously do not last.

PATA is not the state-of-the-art for parallel bus interfacing. Ultra-640 SCSI is a 16-bit wide parallel bus capable of 640 MB/sec (5120 Mbit/s), which is actually faster than SATA 600 MB/s.

However, one challenge with parallel interfaces is that all bits must arrive at the same time even though they each travel over separate wires. Sometimes this is more difficult than serial, because at least with serial you know that one bit will not arrive before the previous bit. The drawback of serial, of course, is that it must run 8, 10, 16, or more times faster to transfer the same amount of data.