I mean those wide, flat cables with many smaller cables inside. Now there’s just the very thin cables. Also USB for external disks.
In: 2
The wide flat cables that you may remember were PATA cables that worked by sending data in parallel.
Modern thinner cable like SATA, SAS, USB are alle serial (that is what the S stands for in all those acronyms)
With parallel connectors and cable if you want to send 8 bits, you send each bit in its own wire. You had 8 wires next to each other and each gets a bit send through it.
It is several people walking next to each other down the street.
Serial connectors send all the data down a wire in series. if you want to send 8 bits you send 8 bits one after the other down a single wire.
It is like several people walking down the street single file.
Intuitively you might think that the parallel way would faster and the serial way slower.
However it turns out getting the timing right in making sure that all the wires were in synch and stuff like that cost more time than just sending all the data down a single path.
This is why most modern connectors are some from of serial connectors. It works faster and better and it also saves a lot of space.
Latest Answers