I remember taking a razor and separating all the strands in the IDE cables and then wrapping them in electrical tape to get the cables into a tube shape.
@@smalltime0 I remember the days prior to IDE, when we had MFM and RLL hard drives and it wasn't just the hard drive cables that were like these, we had floppy disks and tape backups that used ribbon cables also. Cable management wasn't really a thing as there was not much you could do other than rubber band the extra length but it was still a mess of wires.
@tbeehler I know what you mean. I'm old enough to remember when a "monitor" was a teletype terminal with single-pin dot-matrix print head that passed a current through the yellowish paper and literally burned a dot into it, computers used drum or the newer core memory, paper punch tape, no IC chips, and for long-term storage they used 32-track data tapes or the 14 or 24-inch disks. I've seen a lot of change in computers since the days of the IBM and UNIVAC mainframes. For PCs, I've used MS-DOS 1.0 up to 6.2, Windows 1.0 through Windows 10 Pro (for my own computers, I've used Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11FWG, NT4, Win 2000, Win XP, and now Win 10 Pro). My first PC was a Northgate 486 (not a "SX" or "DX", just a straight-up 486, with an extra socket for a Weitek math co-processor, and it had a 213MB SCSI-1 HDD (a friend of mine back then said that I'd never fill that up! Ha!).
@@tbeehler *shudder* IRQ, I'm not old enough for that to have been that big of an issue - until it was. You dusted inside your computer and put the cards back in the wrong order. Reinstall the OS
They touched upon, but didn't answer "why is SATA that transmits just one bit at a time faster than the ATA cables which transmitted 8 bits at a time?" It's not because the bits needs to be split and assembled. It's that they all needed to arrive at the same time at the destination within a tiny window. The higher the speed, the smaller the window. This meant that the buss transceivers needed to have the same drive capability and speed. The capacitance and inductance of the wires within the cable needed to be the same. The sensitivity of the receivers needed to be the same as well as their speed. And since getting an exact match on the speed was difficult to impossible, they needed to send the group of bits slowly enough that they would all arrive within the time window. With SATA, that speed synchronization was no longer required. And that meant that they could send the bits much closer together.
Thats hella interesting. I guess that before, parallelization mattered more than the actual bits going through the wire itself. More wires = more throughput. Now im curious. Why not photonics? Why dont we have photonics sending memory from RAM to the cache?
I can't understand why ata cables can't work without synchronisation, but sata can? Why can't we apply the same synchronization method to ata caples and get much higher performance? Aren't sata cables inside have few wires what ended up syncing with each other? Because it's definitely not a single fat copper wire
@@ishouldhidemynamelmao345 Not quite. The problem is matching the delays between all those wires and the associated electronics at each end. Longer wire do increase the problems, but are not root cause. The closer the matches in propagation delays, the faster the potential speed. So, parallel is easier (just set all the data bits, then after a suitable delay, strobe the latch signal), but serial is much faster since there's no need to match the delays for 8/16/32+1 independent signals, although you do need to synchronize to the byte boundaries.
It's kind of funny how we keep alternating between varying levels of parallel and serial in the pursuit of higher speed. USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 only needed one pair of conductors for the substantial speed jump between the two. Then USB 3.0 came along and added more. Then further levels of USB managed to increase the speed of the same conductors a ways further, but now with things like Gen2x2, USB-C has added more conductors again!
USB 3.0 is the most stupid connector ever, so many problems with them....there are constantly bad contacts, compatibility between USB 2.0 and 3.0 doesn't work that well as it should work....someone shold be in prison for developing such connector with extra little pins and making original pins short. I gave up and I bought USB 2.0 flash disk again because it's reliable and works everywhere. Problem is with USB 3.0 male connectors, female connectors on your motherboard are not the problem.
@@PidalinI’ve never had a problem with the USB-3 connector, just the motherboard header which is designed with two long rows of tiny pins that are fragile so it’s hard to tell if the connector or pin is misaligned, or if you just aren’t using enough force. The “USB-C” header (there is no singular universal name for the header) which is basically just a better USB-3 header is so much better.
@@fallin5427 The Type C header can be more than just USB3 though - for example, it supports up to 18W of power by the standard, it can sometimes do USB Power Delivery, is usually USB 3.2 Gen 2 (i.e. 10Gbit) and it can support other USB alt modes (video, etc).
@@fallin5427 USB-C is reliable connector, there i sno problem with them and if yes, you can just put it there in other direction. But if you didn't have problems with USB 3.0, then you are lucky. Most of flash disks I had, had bad contact, so you have to play with that inside of connector to make it work and it's like that on all computers, problem is in that male connector, not in your PC.
This takes me back. The first time I ever built a dual-boot system, it used the Cable Select mode. I had Windows 98 on one hard drive, and some flavor of Linux on another. I actually installed a toggle switch in the front of my case wired directly to that CS line which allowed me to shut down, flip the switch, and boot off the other drive, as it would always boot off the master drive by default. No software bootloader required.
This is how it should work, I absolutely hate today EFI boot and windows boot manager which screws everything, you don't have anything under your control anymore.
@@Pidalin It was certainly a simpler time in the PC world. Well, all electronics I suppose. As a general rule of thumb I like to retain as much hardware control as is practical in any system I purchase or design. In the audio engineering world, digital mixers and audio interfaces are absolutely amazing, and I love them as much as the next guy, but there's a reason analog consoles are still in heavy use today. Especially in live sound.
@@donaldholden2090 Don't tell me about that, I am that guy who has "stupid" projector with no apps, stereo amplifier and big f*cking speakers 😀 I also keep a lot of older computer hardware because I am pretty sure there will be time when everything new will be that stupid and complicated, that you will just build some "ultimate Win 7" or win XP PC to play good old games with no internet and clients needed and screw that, life is too short, I want things which work and which are not constantly changing under my hands. I don't even play games anymore on modern computer, because you start steam and you need 50GB update, so you go on internet to procrastinate and then you will forget that you wanted to play something, it's stupid.
@@Pidalin ...Projectors have apps now? I'm still rocking my Optima HD20 and a Technics SH-AC500D Dolby Digital decoder paired with some Logitech X-540 speakers. Hello brother.
@@donaldholden2090 Yes, there are projectors with Android TV inside. 😀 I have Optoma HD28e, when I bought it, I had problem with rainbow effect, but I got used to it pretty fast and now I barelly see it. But your Logitech speakers are a typical "gaming" stuff. I have Yamaha A-S501 + speakers Magnat Monitor Supreme 2002. 🙂
Before SATA was coined, we never refer to them as PATA cables. They're referred to as "IDE" cables. I wanted a rounded version of these cables, but they were expensive for my small student allowance, so I never bought it until they became obsolete.
They wouldn't be parent and child unless you were daisy chaining devices. Which some interfaces allowed in the past, these days not so much as hotplugging and multiple USB ports is far more common than it used to be. It used to be that you'd have a parallel port and a couple serial ports and then just ports for mouse and keyboard. If you were very lucky, there might be an SCSI port as well.
Since an IDE cable can only have two devices, master and slave aren't actually more sensible. Primary and secondary, or leader and follower, or main and auxiliary, would be much more descriptive. Also, the second device on the IDE chain doesn't actually take commands from the primary drive, but from the IDE controller on the motherboard. So it even makes less sense to call that one a slave drive to the master drive. And I get it, it's often a bit of an annoyance to have to rewire your brain to accept new nomenclatures for already established ones, and the existing namings might indeed not be offensive to you. That's fine. It however apparently is offensive to others, so why go out of your way to be a bag, if you can simply use one of the many other perfectly usable and effective nomenclatures?
I can say that near the end of my using PATA cables, I used the round longer cables with no trouble at the full 133MB/s speeds. When I got my first SATA capable system, it took me a year or so before I got my first SATA drive. Once I did, I formatted it as my boot drive. My boot PATA drive became a storage drive along with the 120GB PATA drive I had set as slave on that ribbon. When the 40GB drive died, I swapped to a round PATA cable for better management, it was longer than 18 inches but it worked perfectly at full ATA speeds. I used that drive as a storage drive till I got my first SATA only system, and by that point I had enough SATA storage to not miss the PATA drive.
the problem was unshielded wires. If you bought specialty shielded wires you could go longer or bundle them up without issue. It's just the standard was unshielded.
I remember way back when, when i would do a new computer build i would still include a floppy drive for the longest time, even though floppies were long obsolete. Why? Well the BIOSes that were on motherboards at the time: booting from usb, or even cd-rom wasn't always reliable. To flash a BIOS or to recover an OS, it was always rock solid reliable to boot from a floppy. Nowadays that obviously isn't necessary, but back then it felt weird to not have a floppy drive just for that reason
I did too. I even kept a 5.25" floppy drive going too for a lot longer than I ever really needed. Still it was pretty cool in the day I thought. I had both floppy sizes and a tape drive and a Zip drive and a CD burner and a DVD player and USB ports to plug in thumb drives all on one system. I wish I still had it just for nostalgia.
I still come across the occasional floppy disk in my boxes of storage from many moves ago, and I think I still have a 3.5" drive in one box that I kept "just in case" for 20 years longer than needed.
@@gabrielpowers766 I remember backing up so much stuff to CD-ROMs. Since the Internet was so slow back then: 500mb of data was precious: that was like 3 days worth of download time. I had stacks of CDs from old backups.
Thanks for the memories. I'd completly forgotten about having to use jumpers on HD's way back when. It's amazing what you forget. My memories of using jumpers on the motherboard to overclock are more entrenched it would seem.
And when you wanted to hide more components and block the airflow even more than with PATA cables, you switched to SCSI. Combining PATA and SCSI in one case was a LOT of fun.
I want to see a tech quickie going over battery myths. Like when you get a new device do you totally charge before first use? Then on first use discharge battery fully before charging again? Do you keep new batteries between 25 and 90% always? Lots of "best ways" out there but I'd like something more definitive.
It's fun how terminology sometimes gets defined by confusion. ATA is the communications while IDE refers to a disk that has the disk controller built in rather than on a separate card. They are not synonyms. You could've had PATA disks that were not IDE. Of course nobody called it PATA, but that's sort of like how Chinese food in China is called food.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade You could get internal (non-SCSI) serial and parallel connectors, just to buck the trend. But you'd be hard pressed to find something internally to link them to. I think Centronics ports saw limited use in enterprise configs for "hot-swappable" HDDs, before SCSI was really a thing
I'd forgotten about that distinction, but yes. I recall my first couple of builds had to have a hard disk controller card. Then IDE came along making it much simpler.
@@YoSpiff: Yes, when you connected the IDE disk to the motherboard, you were really connecting the on-disk controller card to the ISA bus. Fascinatingly similar in concept to modern M.2 or U.2 where you connect the drive directly to the PCI Express bus.
My first computer was a 386 IBM clone which had a virtual disk controller in BIOS. If you connected a non-IDE disk, you could go into BIOS and manually enter the number if platters, drive heads, cylinders per platter, and number of sectors per cylinder. This was pretty cool because you could hide data using a little machine code to write things to the outer rings of the platters, then tell the BIOS that those cylinders didn't exist.
I used to manually strip apart my ribbon cables to bunch them together and cover in fluorescent electrical tape. Had a black light cathode ray, light up like a Christmas tree in my Antec Super Lanboy case, was SICK!
I always wondered why those old thick cables were used in the computers of yesteryears. Increases my appreciation for the compact and efficient designs of modern systems.
Ah that's why I always wondering where's the jumper for set primary and secondary drive, I grow up with my dad building PC and this memory always vividly stuck on my mind everytime I move or replace sata drive, feels something's wrong.
I remember my dad teaching me how to set the M/S pins on an IDE drive, as though this was key information that'd set me up for the future, rather than an oddity that'd be obsolete in 5 years
The main reason for using parallel interfaces was the limit on switching technology at each end. To get the same throughput though a serial cable it has to be able to switch 8x faster for an 8 pin cable, 16x faster for 16 pin etc etc. High speed switching semiconductors were much harder to make, the wafer sizes were larger etc. Remember that the original IBM PC had a main processor clock speed of only 4.77MHz. This ramped up over time but all of this was incredibly slow by today’s standards.
My dad keeps a special drive that moves to every PC he builds. I am pretty sure it uses these cables and its casing is see through plastic on 5 of the 6 sides with glass on the spinning drive side (he has this drive in center view of his side panel. From when I asked about it years ago, he said he likes to see that drive spin up just because. So he went through the effort to keep it around in every personal system. idk what he keeps on the drive to have it spin up and down throughout operations, but if it brings joy.
Thanks for the video.. side note.. I never had any issues with the round cables.. I remember cutting the flat cables long ways and stacking the cable so it was thin.. that took some practice to pull off without damaging the cables..
when i started out on computers one of the first things i learnt because i didnt know it was the Jumpers, no google or youtube just trial and error, now i cant forget it XD
I still have a PATA cable in one of my PCs. There are a couple of old CD/DVD burners with specialized firmware in it that are better with a couple of functions than anything newer I can find. They take only PATA connections. Since computers no longer have IDE ports, I use a PCIe adapter.
Building a Win98se machine with PATA... Been building since '94, never had a problem with them. The rounded cable had a metal sheath surrounding the cable that helped with interference. (03:11 you can see the braided sheath). Don't think I had one that went longer than 18", tho.
Later round IDE cables, like the ones pictured came with braided shields. Personally, I had far fewer problems with the round IDE cables. It sure allowed for more space inside the case. Of course, during that time, floppy drive cables were still pretty common. They were another type of flat cable you might find.
I was never one to worry much about cable management. But I do remember the first PC I built with SATA and thinking, "gosh, that's nice." Those parallel cables were unwieldy. I do not miss them.
I had round IDE cables - they worked fine if you didn't buy a cheap one. No one called them PATA and no one called it device 1 or 0. It was master and slave
Yet we went back to parallel with the M.2 PCIe drives as transferring at the same time in both directions is quicker than having to wait for one side to entirely finish and the signal integrity issues have been solved already as it is just using the PCIe lanes on the motherboard. As PCIe supports both parallel and serial most M.2 PCIe drives are parallel though you still have a few that are serial.
I/O chips could not handle the higher data rates sequentially so they HAD to use a parallel interface to achieve better speeds. As serial speed increased, leading to increases in parallel, eventually the cross-talk issues with parallel caused more issues than serial speed limits...
Ahh, memories. I still have an old computer sitting at my mom's house with an AMD Athlon X2 processor and good old pata cables, but only thing connected to it is the dvd drive in there. Its funny what we tolerated back then in terms of speed, amazing what happens when you get spoiled with stuff.
@@edthelazyboy Last year I finally upgraded my 13+ year old "gaming" PC, it had an i7-980, 12Gb of DDR3 1600, and a 780 ti directcu ii oc 3gb, I fortunely had one ssd for OS drive so at least I experienced that. I upgraded to an i7-13700K, 32gb DDR5-6000, 4070 ti trinity oc, and a Samsung 990 pro 2tb and an Samsung 980 pro 2tb. To even say I got a huge upgrade is still an understatement! And now, my standard is this, and the spoiling continues lol.
Being able to origami your cables around the case was a badge of honor and if you can't even manage the 90 degree angle, frankly how do you even dress yourself in the morning.
You could've mentioned SCSI cables which were 50 Pin and therefore even wider ;) Also, an early 90s PC could have several kinds of these ribbon cables: Floppy, Hard Drive (IDE), and CD-ROM (sometimes IDE, but often something proprietary that would connect to the sound card, like Mitsumi, MKE, etc)
I remember in the 90's as a kid they had ATA cables wrapped nicely like shown in the video that had cool colors and everything... Always wondered why I had such weird intermittent issues. This would have been helpful about 30 years ago. lol
Good sir, I will have you know I still posses a bunch of PATA cables, two fully functional PATA hard drives, one PATA CD ROM, three PATA DVD burners, a motherboard with PATA connectors (and a floppy drive), AGP graphic card, a case where everything is mounted in, CRT monitor and a PS/2 mouse & keyboard. 🙂
There were exceptionally good storage alternatives back in the days ('m talking about proper workstations), SCSI (parallel SE or parallel LVD / HVD bus with active termination) and FC-AL (serial), both implemented on PCB backplanes with SCA80 / SCA40 device connectors so dealing with any (SCSI or IDE / PATA) ribbons was out of question (and the external links were quite neat by def.).
Yeah, I knew of the PATA term, but it really only came about once SATA came out, and most people just called them SATA and IDE cables to differentiate them.
Don't forget the slightly smaller floppy disk ribbon cables. Also serial and parallel port connectors often had ribbon cables going to the motherboard.
IEEE 1394 aka FireWire was also very good and fast at first but as USB got updated and FireWire wasn’t so much (but mainly because almost no one used it because it was more expensive), usb matched and then exceeded FireWire while also being the most widely adopted port
FireWire was mandatory when you were studying filmmaking back in mid 2000s, USB speed transfer was rubbish and FireWire was the only option for transcoding and recording video from a camcorder without dropping frames... I still remember the hazzle to make the camcorder to work properly as a video recording device on WinXP and Premiere.
Had an external Seagate backup drive that had Firewire and, iirc, usb2. Much faster on the firewire. The Seagate drive died 👀(like always) but it worked fine for my WDs for years after that.
I've been around since the drives used 2 cables, data and signal, as used with MFM and RLL drives. My first hard drive was a 30 MB RLL drive, which cost me $500 with controller and I put it in my XT clone.
Tldw version Cables used to be big because they were parallel cables, where you had 8-16bits of data, addressing may multiplex using the same data lines, some handshake and control signals, lot more bandwidth since the data is moved the same way CPU or GPU would move it while a serial port requires overhead a buffer and bitshifting to take the same data and have in a format the computer can use and require external circuitry to do this Nowadays the overhead and processing power needed for 2 or 3 uart lanes using differential signaling, your Usb serial port and SATA can move several gigabytes a within a few seconds Though parallel cables like ide, scsi, etc have moved to the pci-e, nvme, and m.2 ports now faster than sata and USB
Great! I ALWAYS WONDERED how SATA could be faster than a whole bunch of wires. I looked at it like highways: A 4-lane highway will move far more traffic than one lane each way, especially when the farmer and his tractor have to ride to his neighbor's farm a mile away.
My second computer(and several afterwards) were IDE. Fair enough, my first computer used cassette tapes(a whopping 300 bits per second, or about 10 minutes to load a game) and ROM cartridges for storage so even a floppy drive would've been an improvement.
Yeah, literally everyone called them IDE cables. The whole PATA is a reverse acronym after SATA was introduced. I'm old enough to have used literally every single cable you have mentioned.
TBH, I think the insistence on making everything into an acronym is an indication that folks are younger. Making SCSI, ATA, SATA and IDE into acronyms isn't so bad, but I'm not at all sure how you'd do that with PCMCIA. (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms, as in the expansion interface for laptops before cardbus took over and was ultimately rendered obsolete)
hot/mid30s take but I like ribbon cables. Easy to tell if damaged, interesting look. I also like the modern USB-C ribbon cables you often see in modern dual PCB controllers and similar small devices Talking about master/slave jumpers gave me weird nostalgia
My first PC didn't even have PATA cables. In fact, it didn't even have a hard drive. It had a 5-1/4" floppy drive, and we had to "Please insert disk 2 to continue" booting IBM DOS.😂 Granted, I didn't buy it myself, as I was 7 when we got it. It was a Commodore PC1. The first three orso PCs I bought, indeed had PATA disks, and it's quite possible I still have a ribbon cable or two in the attic, seeing how long I haven't done a good purge of old trash out of there... 😛
@@floridaboz1 I'm fairly sure the Commodore was Christmas 1987, though it might have been the year prior. And the first computer I bought was.... Not exactly sure but second half of the 90s. I don't even know which processor it was, but I do remember having to (or, more wanting to) recompile the Linux kernel to get all the features I wanted in. Then around 2004 I believe? I got an Athlon 64 as the previous one got toasted by a power surge due to lightning. My final _desktop_ with a PATA connector was an Intel Core2Duo E8400, and my final _computer_ with one, was an AMD Phenom II X4 840. But that one I used as a Solaris file server. And now that I listed them all, my gawd, I spent waaaay too much of my paper routes and other after-school job earnings on computers... 🤣😂
Neither is primary/secondary, or controller/node, or server/client. And master/slave may not be offensive to you, and that's fine, but it is to others, so why go out of your way to be a bag, if you can simply use one of the many other perfectly usable and effective nomenclatures?
0:53 "If you look closely at a PATA cable"... Umm... That's not a PATA cable. That's a floppy drive cable. Good to see the proofreading is still an issue.
Not really a proofreading issue, more of an "editor using the wrong stock image" issue. Nothing was wrong with the script, there's just no reason for that image to be in this video at all since they never discuss the difference between the 2 types. A "proofediting" issue?
You won't believe the comedy show I had with those old PATA cables! I'm there, trying to soup up my computer, right? But I'm all thumbs with these rainbow ribbons. And guess what? I somehow manage to plug it in backward! Yeah, you heard me. Spent ages scratching my head wondering why my PC was acting up. Talk about a rookie move!
Look I had to click on this because I was born in the 90's and just destroyed my mom's work PC by playing Legos with it. But then I put it right back. The clunky, huge parts were so fun to learn on! Now though it's even better! One of the very few things in this world that literally only gets better.
I've built plenty of PC's with the old Parallel ATA, starting with the AMD 386/40. So I guess I'm now I'm a "computer enthusiast of the time". *SIGH* I will admit I don't miss the ribbon cables or floppy disks. Also about to leave my last spinning platter behind with the build I am currently gathering parts for.
They still are. Look at PC riser cables :) They are very much the modern day equivalent of the IDE cable. (And in fact ARE parallel cables :) Also Parallel Vs Serial is still more about length and price than everything else. Serial cables are both cheaper and can be made longer/more versatile. Parallel, well it is/will always be much less flexible and expensive.
I had always built my PCs. I remember when trying to make it look a little nicer and facilitate air flow, I bought the "tube" version of the ribbon cables but was frustrated with the drops in connection.
