Serial Ata Vs Parallel Ata Hard Drive

PATA or Parallalel ATA, is the old standard for connecting Disk Drives, while SATA is the newer ones. PATA , in comparison with SATA, has
1) Bulky Connectors which could restrict airflow, maximum length is restricted to 18 ".
2) PATA requires 5 V to run against SATA's 250 mV.
3) PATA is slow, with max transfer speed of 133 MBps while SATA is currently at 400 or 500 MBps.

SATA:Often abbreviated SATA or S-ATA, an evolution of the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA is a serial link -- a single cable with a minimum of four wires creates a point-to-point connection between devices. Transfer rates for Serial ATA begin at 150 MBps and SATA II 300MBps. One of the main design advantages of Serial ATA is that the thinner serial cables facilitate more efficient airflow inside a form factor and also allow for smaller chassis designs.

SATA vs PATA: Serial ATA vs. Parallel ATA Drives

SATA hard drives have many benefits over their older cousin, the Parallel ATA drive. Chief among these differences are:
SATA hard drives are faster and perform much better than traditional ATA drives and are better for high bandwidth applications such as video editing and multiplayer gaming.
SATA drives use a smaller, cheaper cable to connect to the computer's motherboard. These cables can also be up to three feet in length compared to eighteen inches with Parallel ATA cables.
SATA hard drives can be hot swappable, meaning that they can be disconnected and reconnected without powering down the computer. There are limits to this of course. You should never disconnect your boot drive while the computer is operating.
SATA cables are easier to plug in without damaging the delicate connecting pins on the drive.
SATA hard drives are significantly faster than external USB hard drives.

PARALLEL ATA is old technology SERIAL ATA is today generation we can say that SATA is advance technology

The PATA drive was a Seagate Technology® ST160023A, 160 GB 7200 RPM, and it was
connected to the system through a Highpoint Technologies RocketRAID 133 controller card.
The SATA drive was a Seagate Technology ST160827AS, 160 GB 7200 RPM, and it was
connected to the system through a Promise® SATA150 TX4 controller card.
Net Integration chose these controller cards for its test based on its existing product line and
choice for the next generation of controller support by Nitix™.
To compare the transmission speed of the drives, Net Integration used the Linux® utility called
hdparm, which can perform a read timing calculation for a specific drive. The following are the
averaged results:
Timing buffered disk reads for SATA: 55.65 MB/s
Timing buffered disk reads for PATA: 52.46 MB/s