Integrated Drive Electronics

An IDE cable.

The ATA, P-ATA or PATA interface, originally known as IDE, is a standard for interfaces for connecting mass data storage devices and optical disk drives using the ATA-derived standard and the ATAPI standard.

History

The first version of the ATA interface was known as IDE and was developed by Western Digital, in collaboration with Control Data Corporation (in charge of the hard drive part) and Compaq Computer (where installed the first disks).

At first, ATA controllers were only integrated into the motherboard of branded computers such as IBM, Dell or Commodore. Its most widespread version were the multi I/O cards, which grouped the ATA and floppy controllers, as well as the RS-232 ports and the parallel port, and only high-end models incorporated SIMM sockets and connectors to cache the disk. Such device integration meant that a single chip was capable of doing all the work.

Along with the advent of the PCI bus, controllers are almost always included on the motherboard, initially as a chip, later becoming part of the chipset.

Terminology

The terms IDE (Integrated device Electronics), EIDE (Enhanced IDE) and ATA , nowadays PATA, have been used synonymously since they were generally compatible with each other.

On the other hand, although the term “ATA” was used until 2003, with the introduction of Serial ATA (SATA) the retronym was coined. Parallel ATA (PATA).

Versions

• Parallel ATA (P-ATA or PATA)
  • ATA-1, the first version. Its speed is 8MB/s.
  • ATA-2 supports fast block transfers and DMA multipalabras.
  • ATA-3, is the revised and improved ATA-2. All of the above support speeds of 16 MB/s.
  • ATA-4, known as Ultra-DMA (UDMA) or ATA-33, which supports transfers in 33 MB/s.
  • ATA-5 or Ultra ATA/66, originally proposed by Quantum for transfers in 66 MB/s.
  • ATA-6 or Ultra ATA/100, speed support of 100 MB/s.
  • ATA-7 or Ultra ATA/133, speed support of 133 MB/s.
  • ATA-8 or Ultra ATA/166, speed support of 166 MB/s.

• Serial ATA (commonly known as S-ATA or SATA):
  • ATA Remodeling with New:
    • Connectors (feeding and data),
    • Cables,
    • Power pressure.
  • It supports speeds of:
    • 150 MB/s (SATA),
    • 300 MB/s (SATA II),
    • 600 MB/s (SATA III).

• ATA over Ethernet, ATA command Ethernet deployment to mount a storage area network (SAN). It is presented as an alternative to iSCSI.

Speed defined according to transfer mode

Connecting the devices

Classic IDE cable of 40 connectors.

In the ATA interface it is allowed to connect two devices per bus. To do this, of the two devices, only one has to be as slave and the other as master so that the controller knows which device to send the data to and from which device to receive it.. The order of the devices will be “master, slave”, that is, the master will be the first device and the slave will be the second. The configuration is done via jumpers. Therefore, the device can be connected as:

• Master (Master): if it is the only device on the cable, you must have this configuration, although sometimes it also works if it is as a slave. If there is another device, the other must be a slave.
• Slave (Slave): it will work together with the teacher. There must be another device that's a teacher.

Jumper Settings

The jumper configuration is of vital importance since it determines the order in which the system must access the device and therefore, indirectly, from which the system must be booted.

Examples of configuration jumper:

Position of the jumper for the record to be recognized as a master. Configuration of the disk as a slave, the jumper. Settings select cable. The master disk will be the one connecting to the end of the cable, and the slave who connects in the middle. Limits disk storage capacity.

Not all hard drives follow this order.

Disadvantages

The original design of ATA (two devices to one bus) has the drawback that while one device is being accessed, the other device on the same ATA connector cannot be used. On some chipsets (eg Intel FX triton) you could not even use the other ATA at the same time.

This drawback is solved on S-ATA and SCSI, since one device is used on each port.

Obsolescence

ATA drives became more widespread than SCSI drives because of their much lower cost, although their performance was also lower. Due to the limitations that ATA had, they developed its successor, which became known as Serial ATA, which considerably improved performance.

Therefore, nowadays the use of PATA is being progressively reduced, since it has been replaced by SATA.