What is a PATA controller? Parallel ATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment or PATA) is a standard for connecting hard drives into computer systems. As its name implies, PATA is based on parallel signaling technology, unlike serial ATA (SATA) devices that use serial signaling technology. The cable for a SATA connection has seven conductors.
What is a Pata device?
PATA devices are easy to spot by the rather large 40-pin port that connects to a parallel ATA cable. These cables are flat, wide, ribboned cables with 40 parallel wires, hence the designation, parallel. Data is split among the lanes and travels in parallel between the PATA controller and the connected device in a master/slave configuration.
What is PATA (Parallel ATA)?
What is PATA? PATA, also known as Parallel ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment), is a type of internal computer port that attaches to hard drives and other devices. It has been replaced by the faster, sleeker port technology known as Serial ATA, or SATA.
How many PATA connectors are there on a motherboard?
The first motherboards with built-in SATA interfaces usually had only a single PATA connector (for up to two PATA devices), along with multiple SATA connectors. Some PCs and laptops of the era have a SATA hard disk and an optical drive connected to PATA. As of 2007, some PC chipsets, for example the Intel ICH10, had removed support for PATA.
Can I use a PATA to USB adapter?
PATA to USB Adapter. It is mounted on the rear of a DVD-RW optical drive inside an external case Due to a short cable length specification and shielding issues it is extremely uncommon to find external PATA devices that directly use PATA for connection to a computer.
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What is the difference between IDE and PATA?
IDE and PATA are two terms that people typically get confused over since they are used in referring to pretty much the same hard drives. Although it might seem like there should be some difference between the hardware identified by the two, when it comes to hard drives, there is actually no difference.
What is the difference between SATA and PATA?
The term PATA is an acronym for Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment. The term SATA is an acronym for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. PATA is an older technology. SATA is a newer and more advanced form of technology.
What is the PATA stand for?
Parallel Advanced Technology AttachmentPATA stands for Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment which is a bus interface used for connecting secondary storage devices like hard disks, optical drives. It was first introduced in the year 1986 by Western Digital and Compaq.
Is SATA or PATA better?
Increased data transfer rate PATA is capable of data transfers speeds of 66/100/133 MBs/second, whereas SATA is capable of 150/300/600 MBs/second. The speed differences are due to the various flavors of PATA and SATA, with the fastest speeds being the latest version of each currently available.
How do I know if I have SATA or PATA?
Look for the "Interface" option in the specifications. SATA drives generally will be referred to as "SATA," "S-ATA" or "Serial ATA," while PATA drives may be referred to as "PATA," Parallel ATA," "ATA" or, on older drives, simply as "IDE" or "EIDE."
Where do you connect PATA?
PATA cables are flat cables with 40-pin connectors (in a 20x2 matrix) on either side of the cable. One end of the cable plugs into a port on the motherboard, usually labeled IDE, and the other into the back of a storage device like a hard drive.
What are the two main differences between a PATA drive cable and a floppy drive cable?
Floppy drive channel cables look similar to PATA cables, but are a different standard. Floppy cables use a similar-looking ribbon to PATA and feature 34 connector pins compared to PATA's 40. The floppy cables and ports are marginally smaller than PATA cables and ports.
What is a SATA connector?
SATA Hard Drive Connectors Serial ATA (SATA) is the SATA-IO standard interface for storage devices connecting with consumer devices. SATA replaces the parallel ATA bus to meet the increased bandwidth and performance demands of hard disk drive (HDD) storage applications.
What SATA means?
serial advanced technology attachmentSATA, in full serial advanced technology attachment, also called serial ATA, an interface for transferring data between a computer's central circuit board and storage devices. SATA replaced the long-standing PATA (parallel ATA) interface.
What is the advantage of PATA?
The advantage of PATA is that the PATA cables have two devices attached to the cable at one time. One is referred to as device 0 (master) and the other device 1 (slave). A common misconception about using two devices on one cable is that they can only run as fast as the slowest device.
What are two advantages of using SATA technology over PATA choose two?
What are two advantages of using SATA technology over PATA? SATA supports internal and external devices and Each SATA device connects to the host controller through a dedicated link.
Can SSDs have head crashes?
Most modern hard drives have platters which spin at 7200 RPM, or revolutions per minute. Because of this, a knock or bump could potentially result in a catastrophic head crash.
How many volts does a pata cable need?
The cables have a maximum length barrier of 18 inches (46 cm), and require 5 volts of power. One side of a PATA cable features a red line to indicate the layout for pin one, useful when connecting the cable to a compatible device. PATA’s death, however, was that it hit a data transfer ceiling at 150 MBps.
How many devices can a SATa port control?
One PATA port can control up to two legacy parallel devices. SATA uses peer-to-peer technology, (rather than master/slave), so one of its ports controls one device. Motherboards are made with multiple SATA ports for accommodating generous amounts of data storage and optional RAID configurations. SATA devices are also hot-swappable, ...
How many pins are in a parallel ATA cable?
PATA devices are easy to spot by the rather large 40-pin port that connects to a parallel ATA cable. These cables are flat, wide, ribboned cables with 40 parallel wires, hence the designation, parallel. Data is split among the lanes and travels in parallel between the PATA controller and the connected device in a master/slave configuration.
What is a ATA port?
It has been replaced by the faster, sleeker port technology known as Serial ATA, or SATA. Virtually all devices are now made to conform to the SATA standard. A computer motherboard. Originally, PATA was known simply as ATA (pronounced by sounding out the letters).
How long is a SATa cable?
SATA cables can be up to 3 feet (1 meter) in length, are very narrow, and only require 250 millivolts of power. The first release of SATA was as fast as ATA/150 (150 MBps), but used only a fraction of the power required by PATA while also allowing more airflow through case.
Can a motherboard be upgraded to a SATa?
Older motherboards that only have PATA slots can run SATA devices by using a third-party SATA controller that will fit into the slot, thus allowing an upgrade to SATA without upgrading the motherboard. During the interim switch to SATA, motherboards generally featured both types of ports and controllers.
What is a patia drive?
The PATA drive was developed by Western Digital in 1986. It provides a driver with a common interface, which can be used on different devices commonly at the time. PATA drives can provide data transfer rates up to 133 MB/s. In the master/slave configuration, two PATA drives can be connected with one cable.
What is ATA in IBM?
History. Since PATA’s main function is to directly connect to the 16-bit ISA, the standard was originally conceived as "AT Bus Attachment", officially known as "AT accessory" and abbreviated as "ATA". The original ATA specification issued by the Standards Committee uses the name "AT Attachment". "AT" in IBM PC/AT is called "Advanced Technology", so ...
How to use a sata to molex adapter?
1. You can use a SATA to Molex power connector adapter to connect an older PATA device with a power supply that uses 15-pin cable connections. 2. You can use a Molex to SATA adapter to hook up a SATA device with an older power supply that just supports PATA devices with 4-pin power connections. 3.
What is a parallel ATA drive?
Parallel ATA (PATA) drives are one of the hard drive types. They are also known as integrated drive electronics (IDE) or enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE) drives. It is the first hard drive connected to a computer using the PATA interface standard.
What are the two interfaces on a motherboard called?
They are called "primary" and "secondary" ATA interfaces, and they are assigned to the basic addresses 0x1F0 and 0x170 on the ISA bus system.
What is an ATA motherboard?
Two ATA motherboard sockets on the left, with an ATA connector on the right. Parallel ATA ( PATA ), originally AT Attachment, also known as ATA or IDE is standard interface for IBM computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such ...
What is parallel ATA?
Parallel ATA ( PATA ), originally AT Attachment, also known as ATA or IDE is standard interface for IBM computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers.
How many gigabytes is an ATA drive?
The first drive interface used 22-bit addressing mode which resulted in a maximum drive capacity of two gigabytes. Later, the first formalized ATA specification used a 28-bit addressing mode through LBA28, allowing for the addressing of 2 28 ( 268 435 456) sectors (blocks) of 512 bytes each, resulting in a maximum capacity of 128 GiB (137 GB ).
How long is a parallel ATA cable?
Parallel ATA cables have a maximum allowable length of 18 in (457 mm). Because of this limit, the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface.
How fast is ATA 4?
The ATA/ATAPI-4 standard also introduced several "Ultra DMA" transfer modes. These initially supported speeds from 16 MByte/s to 33 MByte/second. In later versions, faster Ultra DMA modes were added, requiring new 80-wire cables to reduce crosstalk. The latest versions of Parallel ATA support up to 133 MByte/s.
When did ATA come out?
Soon after the introduction of Serial ATA (SATA) in 2003, use of Parallel ATA declined. The first motherboards with built-in SATA interfaces usually had only a single PATA connector (for up to two PATA devices), along with multiple SATA connectors. Some PCs and laptops of the era have a SATA hard disk and an optical drive connected to PATA.
When did ATA over Ethernet come out?
In August 2004, Sam Hopkins and Brantley Coile of Coraid specified a lightweight ATA over Ethernet protocol to carry ATA commands over Ethernet instead of directly connecting them to a PATA host adapter. This permitted the established block protocol to be reused in storage area network (SAN) applications.
What is a pata?
PATA is the short form of ‘Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment’ which is actually an interface for connecting the processor and the drives. It should be clear, by interface I mean the way in which your computer and the hard drive is connected. This PATA is also known as ATA or IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics).
What is the difference between a SATa and a PATA?
The main characteristic which differentiates SATA from PATA is that in SATA the information moves between the hard drive and motherboard as serial one, i. e. one bit after another. The main motivation behind the creation of SATA was the increase in the drive speed. For, SATA connection hard drives are very fast.
Why is SATa cable shorter than PATA cable?
So if you use SATA connection, being short in size the cables allow increased airflow inside of the computer case as well as a decrease of heat buildup. This ultimately increases the longevity of computer life.
How many SATa drives are there on a motherboard?
Usually, there are four to six SATA connections in a normal motherboard which allow multiple SATA hard drives to hook up. On the other hand, there are only two PATA connections in a motherboard, allowing a total of four PATA hard drives to be connected.
What is a serial ATA?
Like I said earlier, Serial ATA or SATA and Parallel ATA or PATA are two interfaces that are basically used for connecting to storage devices like hard drives and optical drives. And as it occurs, SATA is the successor to PATA, more likely, PATA is now mostly outdated.
How much power does a SATa drive use?
The SATA drives usually need very little power than PATA drives. The SATA drive usually uses only 250 mV of power, which is even 25 percent of one volt. If you look at the PATA drives, you will see that they require a 5V power connection.
How wide is a SATa cable?
When you have extra length in cables, more flexibility of the positions of the drive can be attained. Moreover, the SATA cable has two 0.25-inch-wide cables which are far narrower than PATA cables. So the SATA cables take up less space in the computer case than the PATA cables. It saves space in there.
What is ATA 2?
ATA-2 - DMA was fully implemented beginning with the ATA-2 version. Standard DMA transfer rates increased from 4.16 megabytes per second (MBps) in ATA-1 to as many as 16.67 MBps. ATA-2 provides power management, PCMCIA card support and removable device support. ATA-2 is often called EIDE (Enhanced IDE), Fast ATA or Fast ATA-2. The total hard drive size supported increased to 137.4 gigabytes. ATA-2 provided standard translation methods for Cylinder Head Sector (CHS) for hard drives up to 8.4 gigabytes in size. CHS is how the system determines where the data is located on a hard drive. The reason for the big discrepancy between total hard drive size and CHS hard drive support is because of the bit sizes used by the basic input/output system ( BIOS) for CHS. CHS has a fixed length for each part of the address: 1 Cylinder = 10-bit, 1024 2 Head = 8-bit, 256 3 Sector = 6-bit, 63*
What is a controller in IDE?
The controller is a small circuit board with chips that provide guidance as to exactly how the hard drive stores and accesses data. Most controllers also include some memory that acts as a buffer to enhance hard drive performance. Before IDE, controllers and hard drives were separate and often proprietary.
How many conductors does an ATA-4 cable have?
In addition to the existing cable that uses 40 pins and 40 conductors (wires), this version introduces a cable that has 80 conductors. The other 40 conductors are ground wires interspersed between the standard 40 conductors to improve signal quality. ATA-4 is also known as Ultra DMA, Ultra ATA and Ultra ATA/33.
Why is there no controller on my computer?
Because the controller is integrated with the drive, there is no overall controller to decide which device is currently communicating with the computer. This is not a problem as long as each device is on a separate interface, but adding support for a second drive on the same cable took some ingenuity.
When did Jeff Tyson write How IDE Controllers Work?
Jeff Tyson "How IDE Controllers Work" 7 March 2001.
Is ATA backward compatible?
There are several variations of ATA, each one adding to the previous standard and maintaining backward compatibility.
Can a controller work with a hard drive?
In other words, a controller from one manufacturer might not work with a hard drive from another manufacturer. The distance between the controller and the hard drive could result in poor signal quality and affect performance. Obviously, this caused much frustration for computer users. Advertisement.
Overview
- What Is PATA
What is PATA? Parallel ATA (PATA) drives are one of the hard drive types. They are also known as integrated drive electronics (IDE) or enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE) drives. It is the first hard drive connected to a computer using the PATA interface standard. To learn more infor… - History
Since PATA’s main function is to directly connect to the 16-bit ISA, the standard was originally conceived as "AT Bus Attachment", officially known as "AT accessory" and abbreviated as "ATA". The original ATA specification issued by the Standards Committee uses the name "AT Attachme…
History and terminology
Parallel ATA interface
Compact Flash interface
ATA standards versions, transfer rates, and features
The standard was originally conceived as the "AT Bus Attachment," officially called "AT Attachment" and abbreviated "ATA" because its primary feature was a direct connection to the 16-bit ISA bus introduced with the IBM PC/AT. The original ATA specifications published by the standards committees use the name "AT Attachment". The "AT" in the IBM PC/AT referred to "Advanced Tech…
Related standards, features, and proposals
Parallel ATA cables transfer data 16 bits at a time. The traditional cable uses 40-pin female connectors attached to a 40- or 80-conductor ribbon cable. Each cable has two or three connectors, one of which plugs into a host adapter interfacing with the rest of the computer system. The remaining connector(s) plug into storage devices, most commonly hard disk drives or optical drives. E…
See also
Compact Flash in its IDE mode is essentially a miniaturized ATA interface, intended for use on devices that use flash memory storage. No interfacing chips or circuitry are required, other than to directly adapt the smaller CF socket onto the larger ATA connector. (Although most CF cards only support IDE mode up to PIO4, making them much slower in IDE mode than their CF capable speed )
External links
The following table shows the names of the versions of the ATA standards and the transfer modes and rates supported by each. Note that the transfer rate for each mode (for example, 66.7 MB/s for UDMA4, commonly called "Ultra-DMA 66", defined by ATA-5) gives its maximum theoretical transfer rate on the cable. This is simply two bytes multiplied by the effective clock rate, and presumes that every clock cycle is used to transfer end-user data. In practice, of cours…