ATA

Advanced Technology Attachment. ATA is a parallel storage interface technology for disk drives and removable media like CD-ROM drives. It was the first technology to integrate the controller onto the drive itself, called IDE or Integrated Device Electronics. Because of this, ATA is also called IDE. However, because many other drive technologies also utilize IDE it is more proper to use the term ATA.

ATA supports two drives per channel, one designated as master and one designated as slave. ATA uses a 40-pin ribbon cable which can be bulky and cumbersome to work with, and is one of the things that lead to the development of SATA. After SATA was released, ATA is now more commonly referred to as PATA for Parallel ATA. ATA has evolved over the years to remain viable by increasing the speed of the bus. Typically ATA will be listed with the speed it supports, such as ATA/66, ATA/100, or ATA/133 for 66, 100, and 133 MB/s respectively.