Everybody needs storage space nowadays. Whether it is used for high performance computing or simply storing family snapshots, we all need room to store data which is important to us.

In the old days (the 1990s) things were fairly easy: you had either ATA or SCSI. The much older RLL and MFM are now called ancient and therefore not talked about in this article. ATA was mainstream for about 10 years and SCSI was expensive, but also very fast. Both standards used a flatcable and the data was sent to and from the drive in parallel. But when speeds increased the timing of each of the separate signals became difficult and just like cd players in the 1980s manufacturers started using serial lines. This meant that higher speeds could be accomplished and also that the huge flatcables were now traded in for much smaller cable, which improved the airflow as well.

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