ATA standards versions, transfer rates, and features

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 course, protocol overhead reduces this value.

Congestion on the host bus to which the ATA adapter is attached may also limit the maximum burst transfer rate. For example, the maximum data transfer rate for conventional PCI bus is 133 MB/s, and this is shared among all active devices on the bus.

In addition, no ATA hard drives existed in 2005 that were capable of measured sustained transfer rates of above 80 MB/s. Furthermore, sustained transfer rate tests do not give realistic throughput expectations for most workloads: They use I/O loads specifically designed to encounter almost no delays from seek time or rotational latency. Hard drive performance under most workloads is limited first and second by those two factors; the transfer rate on the bus is a distant third in importance. Therefore, transfer speed limits above 66 MB/s really affect performance only when the hard drive can satisfy all I/O requests by reading from its internal cache — a very unusual situation, especially considering that such data are usually already buffered by the operating system.

As of April 2010 mechanical hard disk drives can transfer data at up to 157 MB/s,[24] which is beyond the capabilities of the PATA/133 specification. High-performance flash drives can transfer data at up to 308 MB/s.

Only the Ultra DMA modes use CRC to detect errors in data transfer between the controller and drive. This is a 16 bit CRC, and it is used for data blocks only. Transmission of command and status blocks do not use the fast signaling methods that would necessitate CRC. For comparison, in Serial ATA, 32 bit CRC is used for both commands and data.

July 11, 2011

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