"JS" @ wrote in message ...
It's was deemed a less expensive solution at the time.

I have PATA 80 wire for ATA 100 and ATA 133 drives
(connected using either round PATA cables or the traditional flat ribbon)
plus SATA I and SATA II drives.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against SATA
but they just don't deliver on the advertized speed.
Plus the connector design of SATA does not give
me confidence in constantly connecting Hard Drives
on my "Test" computers.


The HDD speed bottleneck is the platter/head transfer, not the electrical
interface. No IDE drive ever transferred data at the limits of the
electrical interface...platter/head was always slower than the ATAPI
standard of the day.

As to serial being faster, serial has many advantages over parallel when
speeds become very high. For instance, jitter and skew are major factors. As
speeds and cable length increase, reliable data transfer becomes less
likely. Longer high-speed parallel cables are impossible unless a
differential cabling system is used, such as with later versions of SCSI,
and even then the length is limited. External IDE was never practical, where
eSATA is just a new physical implementation of the existing SATA standard,
more or less.

In our experience the SATA connectors last many times longer than any IDE
connector ever could. They're far from perfect, but an order of magnitude
better than 40-pin connectors.

-John O