"JS" @ wrote in message ...
Well, in a crude sense think of SATA
as a two lane highway compared to
PATA as an 8 lane highway. If the PATA
cable design was updated to handle higher
transfer rates I would think that PATA could
be at least 4x faster than SATA.


Not possible. 1.33 Gb/s is the practical limit for a copper parallel
transmission line.

And an updated PATA cable need not be a
giant size ribbon cable either. Just imagine if
your ram memory was serial access instead
of DDR2 or DDR3.


Actually, serial RAM memory already exists, but it is only used in very
specialised applications due to the cost. It is, of course, much much
faster than the type of memory that is encountered in a PC, but PC memory is
largely hamstrung because it is based on dynamic architecture which is far
slower (and cheaper) than static architecture. This is why your PC has a
apir of processor caches to speed RAM access up. The L2 cache is a chunk of
static RAM which is about 4 times faster than the main RAM and the L1 cache
is static RAM which is vastly faster than the L2 (and very expensive - which
is why it isn't very big).

FLASH memory is exclusively serial access.