Serial and Parallel ATA discussion

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Mass storage media are currently pushing the envelope of parallel interfaces. Cable properties, connector legacies and signaling protocols have reached a point where trading off one potential problem spot against another has left no more room for technical and design navigation. Cross talk, ground bouncing and signal ringing, along with too tight timing windows have left no margins for improvement beyond ATA PI-7 (UATA-133) and, thus, the industry is confronted with the paradox that the actual storage media such as hard disk drives outperform the connectivity. Other issues like lack of hot swap capability and difficult trace routing on the PCB have done the rest to call for a radical change of guards. Within the next few weeks / months, we will experience a somewhat radical transition from parallel to serial ATA that will deliver higher speed, improved reliability and easier installation along with the introduction of some other nifty features like tagged command queuing to the commodity drive world.