I would expect more connections for it to become faster, so bigger plugs. But instead USB-C are much smaller than original USB (and SATA is much smaller than PATA, etc).
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one of the main differences between PATA and SATA is that in PATA, there is one data channel. The disk and the controller claims the same channel when they want to speak and have to have builtin behaviour where the controller “asks, shuts up and waits for an answer to come back.”
With SATA, there are two channels. One inbound and one outbound. When the controller says something to the disk, the disk can immediately start responding on the other channel.
It may sound dumb, but it makes a huge difference that you can send data to the disk and receive data from it at the same time.
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