On 08/12/2012 08:13 PM, Mouse wrote:
[...run eight
parallel data pairs...]
The problem is that in general you can't [as speeds
rise, skew and
crosstalk get bad]. That's why we have gone SATA rather than PATA.
Well that
was one of the reasons. ;) ATA/IDE was one of the
worst-designed interconnects in the history of this industry. Even
the PC weeniez knew it had to go. SATA, for all of its faults, is a
godsend!
A godsend...to hardware makers and others who benefit from forced
obsolescence.
I'm talking about its technical implementation, not the business
implications. ATA was very much at the "end of its road" in terms of
its design by, say, 1993 or so. We saw how long it lasted after that,
for no good reason.
There was a perfectly good alternative to ATA/IDE, and
has been for
ages. It's called SCSI. It is, and was at the time SATA was
introduced, a mature, proven technology with a huge installed base.
Absolutely. There are several other notable foibles of that
industry...the very existence of (IBM's proprietary) SSA and SAS, which
are both completely pointless in the face of FibreChannel...they are all
just different physical layers for SCSI.
Complete and utter stupidity, combined with greed, is what gives us
this garbage.
I trust you'll forgive a certain amount of cynical
belief on my part
that forced incompatbility in both directions of both hosts and disks
was a major part of what drove the imposition of SATA on customers.
That and NIH are the only excuses I can think of for it.
So you'd prefer to be stuck with the continued existence of IDE? ;)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA