Fiber Optic Wiki

Differences between connectors on 80-conductor cables

July 7, 2011

The image shows PATA connectors after removal of strain relief, cover, and cable. Pin one is at bottom left of the connectors, pin 2 is top left, etc., except that the lower image of the blue connector shows the view from the opposite side, and pin one is at top right.

Parallel ATA

July 6, 2011

Parallel ATA (PATA), originally ATA, is an interface standard for the connection of storage devices such as hard disks, solid-state drives, floppy drives, and optical disc drives in computers. The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee. It uses the underlying AT Attachment (ATA) and AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) standards.

IDE and ATA-1

July 6, 2011

Example of a 1992 80386 PC motherboard with nothing built in other than memory, keyboard, processor, cache, realtime clock, and slots. Such basic motherboards could have been outfitted with either the ST-506 or ATA interface, but usually not both. A single 2-drive ATA interface and a floppy interface was added to this system via the 16-bit ISA card.

Second ATA interface

July 6, 2011

An Oak Technology Mozart 16 16-bit ISA sound card, from when the CDROM drive interface had not yet been standardized. This card offers four separate interface connectors for IDE, Panasonic, Mitsumi, and Sony CDROM drives, but only one connector could be used since they all shared the same interface wiring.

EIDE and ATA-2

July 6, 2011

In 1994, about the same time that the ATA-1 standard was adopted, Western Digital introduced drives under a newer name, Enhanced IDE (EIDE). These included most of the features of the forthcoming ATA-2 specification and several additional enhancements. Other manufacturers introduced their own variations of ATA-1 such as "Fast ATA" and "Fast ATA-2".