Serial hard disk, parallel port hard disk and the difference between the two

How do you want to buy a computer or assemble a computer, you must first understand some hardware knowledge, in this article for everyone to introduce the serial port and parallel port hard disk, and the two The difference between the two. I hope to help you.

In order to facilitate everyone's understanding, you can understand the difference between serial hard disk and parallel hard disk in this way:

Generally speaking, the serial port describes a lane, and the parallel port has 8 lanes

8 bits (one byte) of data can be transferred at the same time.

But it is not a parallel port, due to mutual interference between the 8-bit channels. Transmission speed is limited. Moreover, when the transmission is in error, it is necessary to retransmit 8 bits of data at the same time. There is no interference in the serial port, and one bit can be retransmitted after the transmission error. So it's faster than the parallel port. Serial hard drives are like this.

Here we distinguish serial interface to share the hard disk drives and parallel data lines, as shown below:

hard disk serial data line and parallel comparison

"serial hard drive" Differences from "parallel hard drive"

With the maturity of technology, more and more motherboards and hard drives are beginning to support SATA (Serial ATA), and SATA interfaces are gradually replacing the traditional PATA (Parallel ATA) trend. . So what is the difference between SATA and PATA in the transmission mode, and what advantages does SATA have over PATA? This is the topic that this article needs to discuss.

What is Parallel ATA?
ATA is actually the interface standard for IDE devices. Most hard drives, optical drives, floppy drives, etc. use ATA interfaces. For example, most of the friends now use hard disks with parallel ATA interfaces. Should you be familiar with the 80-pin cable interface? Usually we talk about the hard disk interface, we have to mention what Ultra-ATA/100, Ultra-ATA/133, what does this mean? This tells us that the maximum transfer rate of the hard disk interface is 100MB/s and 133MB/s, and the hard disk is transmitted in parallel, so we also call this type of hard disk as parallel ATA.

What is Serial ATA

The full name of Serial ATA is Serial ATA, which is a new interface standard. The main difference with Parallel ATA is its transmission method. Unlike parallel transmission, it has only two pairs of data lines, using point-to-point transmission to transmit data packets at a higher speed than parallel transmission. The current Serial ATA interface has a transfer rate of 150MB/s, and this value will grow rapidly.