ATA
From TPU Reference
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Article requires additional information in the "Technical Specifications" section.
ATA, which stands for Advanced-Technology-Attachment, is a standards specification for connecting drives (optical, hard disk, etc.) to a computer motherboard's core logic. Over the past few decades there have been many evolutionary developments in the ATA standard as speed and capacity requirements increased. With Western Digital's introduction of IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) hard disk drives, the drive controller was moved to the PCB on the actual disk drives and increased the maximum supported capacity size.
The most common implementation today of ATA is the Parallel ATA connection interface, which is often times referred to as IDE, EIDE, or just ATA. These terms are now interchangeable as all PATA hard disk drives have come to use the same technology.
Another form of ATA is Serial ATA (or SATA). This new standard boasts higher transfer speeds thanks to its serial bus connection and reduced cable size. As of 2006, PATA has become almost obsolete as chipset manufacturers such as Intel plan to phase out the interface completely. While sharing a similar name and technology to PATA, SATA is never referred to as simply ATA, and is considered almost a completely separate connection technology.
Technical specifications
Parallel ATA operates at from 33 MHz when using a 40 pin cable 66 to 133 MHz(in 33 MHz increments) when using a 80 cable.
The difference between 40 and 80 cable is extra grounds were added for eatch pin to decrease the amount of EMI that parallel signals create when traveling at higher clocks
An ATA cable, also known as an IDE cable, consists of up to 3 40-80 pin connectors and a ribbon cable.
