By Don Patzsch, Tampa PC Users Group
patzsch@helios.acomp.usf.edu

If you had taken off both sides of your computer so that you could see inside easily, you would notice the prominent cables. The cable that interconnects your drives is a parallel cable which means that it has at least seven wires, and they are arranged in a flat cable with wide connectors.

Now a new system is becoming available, and it is a serial system, which means much smaller cables and much faster transfer of data.

SCSI drives are faster than the ATA drives we have been used to. The new SATA drives are faster and they will change your old 133MBps to perhaps 600 MBps. A real increase in speed. SATA is backward compatible to the present ATA (IDE) drives.

The price is expected to be similar to the present drives. Fiber channel and SCSI drives are more expensive, about four times more expensive. So look for the new drives late this year or early in 2003.

The new computers will have less wiring to hamper the air flow inside your computer and should make the machines less expensive and faster! u