What's an ATA?

[smp]

 

[pm]

That's a good question. All I know is that ATA stands for AT Attachment. But I don't know what the "AT" stands for. ATA refers the IDE/ATA interface - which is the cheaper and more common of the two prevalent hard disk standards (SCSI and IDE/ATA). Nowadays, you usually ATA33, ATA66 and ATA100 - which refers to the peak theoretical bandwidth of various speeds of the ATA interface.

See this tutorial from StorageReview.Com.

 

[Budman]

Short for AT Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:

ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).
ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.
Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.
ATA/66: A new version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that will double ATA's throughput to 66 MBps. The first ATA/66 computers are expected to be available in the first half of 1999.


Did a cut & paste from here.

 

[smp]

Yeah I thought it was a bandwidth thing ... just didn't know the abbreviation (sp? w?) and what it stood for.. okay sweet.. so the 100 ata drive I just got is a good thing.. (which I new too, just wanted to know how good)
thanks

 

[timco]

A couple of years back I came across the abbreviation "ATAPI", which was used in the context of CD-Roms. I think it used to stand for ATA Packet Interface.

pm says that "ATA" stands for "AT Attachment". When IBM ruled the world, it produced an XT and an AT model. XT stood for eXtended Technology. AT stood for Advanced Technology...

So... "Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface"... That sounds stupid doesn't it? Never mind, back to sleep for me...