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ATA – Advanced Technology Attachment

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:35 am

(1) Short for Advanced Technology 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 version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that doubles ATA’s throughput to 66 MBps.
  • ATA/100: An updated version of ATA/66 that increases data transfer rates to 100 MBps.
  • ATA also is called Parallel ATA. Contrast with Serial ATA.

    (2) Short for Analog Telephone Adapter