15 Facts About Ultra ATA

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

Parallel Ultra 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, Ultra ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application.

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

Physical Ultra 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.

Related searches

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

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

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

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

Later, the first formalized Ultra 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 .

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

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

Round parallel Ultra 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 Ultra ATA specifications.

Serial Ultra 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 Ultra ATA interface, intended for use on devices that use flash memory storage.