From LQWiki

ATA stands for Advanced Technology Attachment. The ATA -term is commonly used interchangeably with IDE. The older and more common paraller ATA (P-ATA) is currently being replaced by serial ATA (SATA).

Most PCs have two IDE controllers on the motherboard. One IDE controller can support two devices, so four storage devices is usually the maximum. Paraller ATA interface uses ribbon cables with 40 -pin connectors to connect the hard drives to the motherboard. The cable has usually three connectors. Of these one is connected to the motherboard and the rest two are left for hard drives. If two hard drives are connected to the same controller, one must be defined as master and the other one as slave. This is done with jumpers.

ATA-2 is the real standard for what is widely known as EIDE. ATA-2 introduced higher speed data transfer modes: PIO Modes 3 and 4 plus Multiword DMA Mode 1 and 2. These modes allow the ATA interface to run data transfers up to about 16MB/second.

See also

• ATAPI - ATA Packet Interface
• IDE tree mapping - How ATA volumes are named

External links

• Wikipedia ATA article (en.wikipedia.org)
• IDE/ATA overview & history (www.pcguide.com)