17 Facts About Parallel ATA

Parallel ATA, originally AT Attachment, known as ATA or IDE is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers.

Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment.

For many years, Parallel ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application.

The original Parallel ATA specifications published by the standards committees use the name "AT Attachment".

Physical Parallel ATA interfaces became a standard component in all PCs, initially on host bus adapters, sometimes on a sound card but ultimately as two physical interfaces embedded in a Southbridge chip on a motherboard.

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The interface cards used to connect a parallel ATA drive to, for example, an ISA Slot, are not drive controllers: they are merely bridges between the host bus and the ATA interface.

Since the original Parallel ATA interface is essentially just a 16-bit ISA bus in disguise, the bridge was especially simple in case of an Parallel ATA connector being located on an ISA interface card.

Short-lived, seldom-used implementation of Parallel ATA was created for the IBM XT and similar machines that used the 8-bit version of the ISA bus.

Parallel ATA-2 was the first to note that devices other than hard drives could be attached to the interface:.

For example, Parallel ATA-4 supported Ultra DMA modes 0 through 2, the latter providing a maximum transfer rate of 33 megabytes per second.

Later, the first formalized Parallel ATA specification used a 28-bit addressing mode through LBA28, allowing for the addressing of 2 sectors of 512 bytes each, resulting in a maximum capacity of 128 GiB .

Parallel ATA-6 introduced 48-bit addressing, increasing the limit to 128 PiB .

Parallel ATA became the primary storage device interface for PCs soon after its introduction.

In more recent computers, the Parallel ATA interface is rarely used even if present, as four or more Serial ATA connectors are usually provided on the motherboard and SATA devices of all types are common.

Round parallel ATA cables were eventually made available for 'case modders' for cosmetic reasons, as well as claims of improved computer cooling and were easier to handle; however, only ribbon cables are supported by the ATA specifications.

Serial Parallel ATA standard has supported native command queueing since its first release, but it is an optional feature for both host adapters and target devices.

Compact Flash in its IDE mode is essentially a miniaturized Parallel ATA interface, intended for use on devices that use flash memory storage.