PATA vs. SATA: I guess it does matter

January 19, 2010 – As anybody that’s spent any time doing site analytics knows, you inevitably wind up unearthing some seemingly inexplicable stuff. Such is the case with an InfoStor article titled “PATA vs. SATA: What does it matter?”

Back when we first started doing Web site analytics, we noticed that this article had a surprisingly high hit rate. At the time, that wasn’t perplexing. It was a well-written article (by Cambridge Computer consultant Jacob Farmer) on a hot topic.

However, that article continues to generate a lot of page views – even this month.

The problem, or reason for perplexity? It was written in 2004.

You can read “PATA vs. SATA: Does it matter” here.

In case it’s not obvious why I’m perplexed (to the point of obsession), I thought that PATA (Parallel ATA, aka IDE) was a dead technology. PATA, or IDE, hasn’t come up in my conversations with vendors or users in the last half-decade.

At first, I thought this might have something to do with searches related to the Pacific Asia Travel Association. But after Googling “pata,” “pata vs. sata,” etc I realized that a surprising (to me) number of people still have PATA/IDE interfaces and are interested in the PATA-to-SATA conversion issue.

My myopia, or plain ignorance, probably stems from the fact that InfoStor concentrates on SMB/enterprise disk arrays, and not on individual or SOHO users. As such, all of my drive-level discussions center on SAS, Fibre Channel or SATA.

Nevertheless, I’m still perplexed by the popularity of the SATA vs. PATA article. If you can shed any light on this, comment below or shoot me an email at daves@pennwell.com.

Googling “pata vs. sata” turned up some interesting stuff. One example: In a comment on an article originally posted in 2002 (“SATA vs. PATA: the reality of Serial and Parallel ATA”), a user refers readers to the InfoStor article in question. That user’s comment was posted on December 14, 2009.

Also interesting: The bulk of the searches that led to the PATA vs. SATA InfoStor article came from the U.S. However, almost as many came from Canada. That’s way out of whack with our general site traffic, where Canada represents about 3% of our site visitors.