AT attachment
ATA connector on the left, with two motherboard ATA connectors on the right. Image File history File linksMetadata Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixel Image in higher resolution (2272 × 1704 pixel, file size: 476 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): AT Attachment Metadata... Download high resolution version (1698x1110, 276 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ...
Type	Internal storage device connector
Production history
Designer	Western Digital
Designed	1986
Superseded by	Serial ATA (2003)
Specifications
Hot pluggable	no
External	no
	Width	16 bits
	Bandwidth	16 MB/s originally later 33, 66, 100 and 133 MB/s
	Max devices	2 (master/slave)
	Protocol	Parallel
Cable	40 wire ribbon cable
Pins	40
Pin out
Pin 1		Reset
Pin 2		Ground
Pin 3		Data 7
Pin 4		Data 8
Pin 5		Data 6
Pin 6		Data 9
Pin 7		Data 5
Pin 8		Data 10
Pin 9		Data 4
Pin 10		Data 11
Pin 11		Data 3
Pin 12		Data 12
Pin 13		Data 2
Pin 14		Data 13
Pin 15		Data 1
Pin 16		Data 14
Pin 17		Data 0
Pin 18		Data 15
Pin 19		Ground
Pin 20		Key or VCC_in
Pin 21		DDRQ
Pin 22		Ground
Pin 23		I/O write
Pin 24		Ground
Pin 25		I/O read
Pin 26		Ground
Pin 27		IOC HRDY
Pin 28		Cable select
Pin 29		DDACK
Pin 30		Ground
Pin 31		IRQ
Pin 32		No connect
Pin 33		Addr 1
Pin 34		GPIO_DMA66_Detect
Pin 35		Addr 0
Pin 36		Addr 2
Pin 37		Chip select 1P
Pin 38		Chip select 3P
Pin 39		Activity
Pin 40		Ground

ATA cables:
40 wire ribbon cable (top)
80 wire ribbon cable (bottom)

Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) is a standard interface for connecting storage devices such as hard disks, solid state disks and CD-ROM drives inside personal computers. Western Digital Corporation (NYSE: WDC) (often abbreviated to WD) is a manufacturer of a large proportion of the worlds hard disks, and has a long history in the electronics industry as an IC maker and a storage products company. ... For other uses of SATA or Sata, see SATA (disambiguation). ... Left: 20-way grey ribbon cable with wire no. ... Image File history File links ATA_Plug. ... Download high resolution version (1880x546, 86 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Download high resolution version (1880x546, 86 KB) Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... “Standard” redirects here. ... An electrical connector is a conductive device for joining electrical circuits together. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Solid state drive. ... The CD-ROM (an abbreviation for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (ROM)) is a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. ...

The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee T13. Many synonyms and near-synonyms for ATA exist, including abbreviations such as IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface). Also, with the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA). INCITS stands for INterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards ... For other uses of SATA or Sata, see SATA (disambiguation). ... A retronym is a type of neologism coined for an old object or concept whose original name has come to be used for something else, is no longer unique, or is otherwise inappropriate or misleading. ...

Parallel ATA standards allow cable lengths up to only 18 inches (46 centimeters) although cables up to 36 inches (91 cm) can be readily purchased. Because of this length limit, the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. It provides the most common and the least expensive interface for this application.

History

The name of the standard was originally conceived as PC/AT Attachment. as its primary feature was a direct connection to the 16-bit ISA bus then known as 'AT bus;' the name was shortened to an inconclusive "AT Attachment" to avoid possible trademark issues. The IBM PC/AT was IBMs third-generation PC, designed around the Intel 80286 microprocessor and released in 1984. ... Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to ISA) is a bus standard for IBM compatibles introduced in 1984 that extends the XT bus architecture to 16 bits. ...

An early version of the specification was conceived by Western Digital in 1986; known as Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) due to the drive controller on the drive itself as opposed to a separate controller connected to the motherboard. Western Digital Corporation (NYSE: WDC) (often abbreviated to WD) is a manufacturer of a large proportion of the worlds hard disks, and has a long history in the electronics industry as an IC maker and a storage products company. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Host adapter. ... A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. ...

Enhanced IDE (EIDE) — an extension to the original ATA — allowed the support of drives having a storage capacity larger than 504 MiB (528 MB), up to 7.8 GiB (8.4 GB). The terms IDE and EIDE often appear interchangeable with ATA.^[1] With the introduction of Serial ATA around 2003, conventional ATA was retroactively renamed to Parallel ATA (P-ATA), referring to the method in which data travels over wires in this interface. MiB redirects here. ... This article is about a unit of data. ... A gibibyte is a unit of information or computer storage. ... This article is about the unit of measurement. ...

The interface initially worked only with hard disks, but eventually came to work with a variety of other devices — generally those using removable media. These devices include CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives, tape drives, and large-capacity floppy drives such as the Zip drive and SuperDisk drive. Removable media devices other than CD and DVD drives are classified as ARMD (ATAPI Removable Media Device) and can appear as either a super-floppy (non-partitioned media) or a hard drive (partitioned media) to the operating system. DVD is an optical disc storage media format that is used for playback of movies with high video and sound quality and for storing data. ... DDS tape drive. ... A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. ... Iomega ZIP-100 Drive Logo An internal Zip drive. ... Also known as the LS-120 and the later variant LS-240, the SuperDisk was introduced by 3Ms storage products group (later known as Imation) circa 1997 as a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 3. ... An operating system (OS) is a software that manages computer resources and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. ...

The original ATA specification used a 28-bit addressing mode, allowing for the addressing of 2²⁸ (268,435,456) sectors (with blocks of 512 bytes each;, resulting in a maximum capacity of 137 gigabytes (128 GiB). The standard PC BIOS system supported up to 7.88 GiB (8.46 GB), with a maximum of 1024 cylinders, 256 heads and 63 sectors. ATA-6 introduced 48 bit addressing, increasing the limit to 128 PiB (or 144 petabytes). Some OS environments, including Windows 2000, until Service Pack 3, did not enable 48-bit LBA by default, requiring the user to take extra steps to get full capacity on a 160 GB drive. A pebibyte is a unit of information or computer storage. ... A petabyte is a unit of measurement in computers of one thousand million million (short-scale quadrillion) bytes. ...

Parallel ATA interface

Until the introduction of Serial ATA, 40-pin connectors generally attached drives to a ribbon cable. Each cable has two or three connectors, one of which plugs into an adapter interfacing with the rest of the computer system. The remaining connector(s) plug into drives. Parallel ATA cables transfer data 16 bits at a time. Image File history File links Nappe. ... Left: 20-way grey ribbon cable with wire no. ...

ATA's ribbon cables had 40 wires for most of its history, but an 80-wire version appeared with the introduction of the Ultra DMA/33 (UDMA) mode. All of the additional wires in the new cable are ground wires, interleaved with the previously defined wires to reduce the effects of capacitive coupling between neighboring signal wires, reducing crosstalk. Capacitive coupling is more of a problem at higher transfer rates, and this change was necessary to enable the 66 megabytes per second (MB/s) transfer rate of UDMA4 to work reliably. The faster UDMA5 and UDMA6 modes also require 80-conductor cables. It has been suggested that Ground conductor be merged into this article or section. ... In electronics, capacitive coupling is the transfer of energy from one circuit to another by means of the mutual capacitance between the circuits. ... Look up crosstalk in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Though the number of wires doubled, the number of connector pins and the pinout remain the same as 40-conductor cables, and the external appearance of the connectors is identical. Internally the connectors are different; the connectors for the 80-wire cable connect a larger number of ground wires to a smaller number of ground pins, while the connectors for the 40-wire cable connect ground wires to ground pins one-for-one. 80-wire cables usually come with three differently colored connectors (blue, gray & black) as opposed to uniformly colored 40-wire cable's connectors (all black). The gray connector on 80-pin cables has pin 28 CSEL not connected; making it the slave position for drives configured cable select.

Using non-standard cables

The ATA standard has always specified a maximum cable length of 46 cm (18 inches), and flat cables with particular impedance and capacitance characteristics. It may be desirable to use alternative cables, e.g. to have longer cables when connecting drives within a large computer case or when mounting several physical drives into one computer, or to use rounded cables to improve airflow (cooling) inside the computer case. Such cables are widely available on the market and used successfully in most cases. However, the user must understand that they are outside the parameters set by the specifications and should be used with caution. The short standard cable length makes the use of parallel ATA for external devices impossible in almost all situations. Electrical impedance, or simply impedance, is a measure of opposition to a sinusoidal alternating electric current. ... Capacitance is a measure of the amount of electric charge stored (or separated) for a given electric potential. ...

Pin 20

In the ATA standard, Pin 20 is defined as key and is not used. However, some flash memory disks can use pin 20 as VCC_in to power disk without need of special power cable^[2]. A USB flash drive. ...

Pin 28

Pin 28 of the gray connector of an 80 conductor cable is not attached to any conductor of the cable. It is attached normally on the blue and black connectors.

Pin 34

Pin 34 is connected to ground inside the blue connector of an 80 conductor cable but not attached to any conductor of the cable. It is attached normally on the gray and black connectors. See page 315 of [1].

Differences between connectors on 80 conductor cables

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. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 600 × 600 pixel Image in higher resolution (1300 × 1300 pixel, file size: 590 KB, MIME type: image/png) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): AT Attachment ...

Each contact comprises a pair of points which together pierce the insulation of the ribbon cable with such precision, they make an excellent connection to the desired conductor without harming the insulation on the neighboring wires. The center row of contacts are all connected to the common ground bus and attached to the odd numbered conductors of the cable. The top row of contacts are the even-numbered sockets of the connector (mating with the even-numbered pins of the receptacle) and attach to every other even-numbered conductor of the cable. The bottom row of contacts are the odd-numbered sockets of the connector (mating with the odd-numbered pins of the receptacle) and attach to the remaining even-numbered conductors of the cable.

Note the connections to the common ground bus from sockets 2 (top left), 19 (center bottom row), 22, 24, 26, 30, and 40 on all connectors. Also note (enlarged detail, bottom, looking from the opposite side of the connector) that socket 34 of the blue connector does not contact any conductor but unlike socket 34 of the other two connectors, it does connect to the common ground bus. On the gray connector, note that socket 28 is completely missing, so that pin 28 of the drive attached to the gray connector will be open. On the black connector, sockets 28 and 34 are completely normal, so that pins 28 and 34 of the drive attached to the black connector will be connected to the cable. Pin 28 of the black drive reaches pin 28 of the host receptacle but not pin 28 of the gray drive, while pin 34 of the black drive reaches pin 34 of the gray drive but not pin 34 of the host. Instead, pin 34 of the host is grounded.

The standard dictates color-coded connectors for easy identification by both installer and cable maker. All three connectors are different from one another. The blue (host) connector has the socket for pin 34 connected to ground inside the connector but not attached to any conductor of the cable. Since the old 40 conductor cables do not ground pin 34, the presence of a ground connection indicates that an 80 conductor cable is installed. The wire for pin 34 is attached normally on the other types and is not grounded. Installing the cable backwards (with the black connector on the system board, the blue connector on the remote device and the gray connector on the center device) will ground pin 34 of the remote device and connect host pin 34 through to pin 34 of the center device. The gray center connector omits the connection to pin 28 but connects pin 34 normally, while the black end connector connects both pins 28 and 34 normally.

Multiple devices on a cable

If two devices attach to a single cable, one is commonly referred to as a master and the other as a slave. The master drive generally appears first when the computer's BIOS and/or operating system enumerates available drives. On old BIOSes (486 era and older), the drives are often referred to by the BIOS as "C" for the master and "D" for the slave following the way DOS would refer to the active primary partitions on each. For other uses, see Bios. ... An operating system (OS) is a software that manages computer resources and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. ...

If there is a single device on a cable, it should be configured as master. However, some hard drives have a special setting called single for this configuration (Western Digital, in particular). Also, depending on the hardware and software available, a single drive on a cable can work reliably even though configured as the slave drive (this configuration is most often seen when a CD ROM has a channel to itself).

Cable select

A drive setting called cable select was described as optional in ATA-1 and has come into fairly widespread use with ATA-5 and later. A drive set to "cable select" automatically configures itself as master or slave, according to its position on the cable. Cable select is controlled by pin 28. The host adapter grounds this pin; if a device sees that the pin is grounded, it becomes the master device; if it sees that pin 28 is open, the device becomes the slave device.

This setting is usually chosen by placing a jumper on the "cable select" position, usually marked CS, rather than on the "master" or "slave" position. Note, pin 28 is only used by the drive to determine its position on the cable and thus whether it's the "master" or "slave"; it isn't in any way a "drive select" pin used when the host is issuing commands so if a drive is jumpered to "master" or "slave" its position on the cable doesn't have to match the pin 28 meaning of "master" and "slave". Top: jumper block on IDE hard drive with shunt; bottom: assorted shunts In electronics and particularly computing, a jumper is two or more connecting points that can be conveniently shorted together to set up or adjust a printed circuit board, such as a computers motherboard. ...

With the 40-wire cable it was very common to implement cable select by simply cutting the pin 28 wire between the two device connectors; putting the slave device at the end of the cable, and the master on the "middle" connector. This arrangement eventually was standardized in later versions. If there is just one device on the cable, this results in an unused "stub" of cable, which is undesirable for physical convenience and electrical reasons. The stub causes signal reflections, particularly at higher transfer rates. Signal reflection occurs because when a signal is transmitted along a transmission medium, such as a copper cable or an optical fibre, there is the possibility that some of the signal power will be reflected back to its origin, rather than being carried all the way along the cable to...

When the 80-wire cable was defined for use since ATAPI5/UDMA4, the master device goes at the end of the 18-inch (460 mm) cable(black connector), the middle-slave connector is grey, the blue connector goes onto the motherboard. So, if there is only one (master)device on the cable, there is no cable "stub" to cause reflections. Also, cable select is now implemented in the slave device connector, usually simply by omitting the contact from the connector body. Both the 40-wire and 80-wire parallel-IDE cables share the same 40-socket connector configuration.

Master and slave clarification

Although they are in extremely common use, the terms master and slave do not actually appear in current versions of the ATA specifications. The two devices are correctly referred to as device 0 (master) and device 1 (slave), respectively. It is a common myth that "the master drive arbitrates access to devices on the channel" or that "the controller on the master drive also controls the slave drive." In fact, the drivers in the host operating system perform the necessary arbitration and serialization, and each drive's controller operates independently. Both are really "slaves" to the driver in the host OS.

Serialized, overlapped, and queued operations

The parallel ATA protocols up through ATA-3 require that once a command has been given on an ATA interface, it must complete before any subsequent command may be given. Operations on the devices must be serialized—with only one operation in progress at a time—with respect to the ATA host interface. A useful mental model is that the host ATA interface is busy with the first request for its entire duration, and therefore can not be told about another request until the first one is complete. The function of serializing requests to the interface is usually performed by a device driver in the host operating system.

The ATA-4 and subsequent versions of the specification have included an "overlapped feature set" and a "queued feature set" as optional features. However, support for these is extremely rare in actual parallel ATA products and device drivers. By contrast, overlapped and queued operations have been common in other storage buses. In particular, tagged command queuing is characteristic of SCSI, this has long been seen as a major advantage of SCSI. TCQ redirects here; it is also the IATA code for the Crnl. ...

The Serial ATA standard has supported native command queueing since its first release, but it is an optional feature for both host-adapters and target-devices. Many less expensive PC motherboards do not support NCQ. Nearly all SATA/II hard drives sold today support NCQ, while very few removable (CD/DVD) drives do. Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a technology designed to increase performance of SATA hard disks by allowing the individual hard disk to receive more than one I/O request at a time and dynamically change the order in which they are applied. ...

Two devices on one cable - speed impact

There are many debates about how much a slow device can impact the performance of a faster device on the same cable. There is an effect, but the debate is confused by the blurring of two quite different causes, called here "Slowest Speed" and "One Operation at a Time".

"Slowest speed"

It is a common misconception that, if two devices of different speed capabilities are on the same cable, both devices' data transfers will be constrained to the speed of the slower device.

For all modern ATA host adapters this is not true, as modern ATA host adapters support independent device timing. This allows each device on the cable to transfer data at its own best speed. Even with older adapters without independent timing, this effect only impacts the data transfer phase of a read or write operation. This is usually the shortest part of a complete read or write operation.

"One operation at a time"

This is caused by the omission of both overlapped and queued feature sets from most parallel ATA products. Only one device on a cable can perform a read or write operation at one time, therefore a fast device on the same cable as a slow device under heavy use will find it has to wait for the slow device to complete its task first.

The impact of this on a system's performance depends on the application. For example, when copying data from an optical drive to a hard drive (such as during software installation), this effect probably doesn't matter: Such jobs are necessarily limited by the speed of the optical drive no matter where it is. But if the hard drive in question is also expected to provide good throughput for other tasks at the same time, it probably should not be on the same cable as the optical drive.

HDD Passwords and Security

The disk lock is a built-in security feature in the disk. It is part of the ATA specification, and thus not specific to any brand or device.

A disk always has two passwords: A User password and a Master password. Most disks support a Master Password Revision Code, which can tell you if the Master password has been changed, or if it still the factory default. The revision code is word 92 in the IDENTIFY response. A value of 0xFFFE means the Master password is unchanged.

A disk can be locked in two modes: High security mode or Maximum security mode. Bit 8 in word 128 of the IDENTIFY response tell you which mode your disk is in: 0 = High, 1 = Maximum.

In High security mode, you can unlock the disk with either the user or master password, using the "SECURITY UNLOCK DEVICE" ATA command. There is an attempt limit, normally set to 5, after which you must power cycle or hard-reset the disk before you can attempt again.

In Maximum security mode, you cannot unlock the disk - the only way to get the disk back to a usable state is to issue the SECURITY ERASE PREPARE command, immediately followed by SECURITY ERASE UNIT. The SECURITY ERASE UNIT command requires the Master password and will completely erase all data on the disk. The operation is rather slow, expect half an hour or more for big disks. (Word 89 in the IDENTIFY response indicates how long the operation will take.) ^{[3] [4]}

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") 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. This article is about the computer bus type. ...

In addition, no ATA hard drives as of 2005 exist 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 is usually already buffered by the operating system. Typical hard drives of the mid-1990s. ... For other uses, see cache (disambiguation). ...

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. ^[5] A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is a type of function that takes an input of data stream of any length and produces as output a value of a certain fixed size. ...

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 Network-attached storage applications. This article refers to the computer hard disk. ... Coraid, Inc. ... ATA over Ethernet (AoE) is a network protocol developed by the Brantley Coile Company[1], designed for accessing ATA storage devices over Ethernet networks. ... Ethernet is a large, diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies that operate at many speeds for local area networks (LANs). ... Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients. ...

Technical criticisms

Criticisms of current versions

The write cache of ATA disk drives is enabled by default to increase performance. If a power failure occurs before data in the write cache has been flushed to the disk, data will be lost. There is a "flush cache" command in ATA protocol, which will write the entire cache to medium before returning. However, the protocol does not allow a way to inquire a drive if a particular sector has been written or not.^[6][7]

Criticisms of obsolete versions

ATA1 (section 9.22)^[8], ATA2^[9], ATA3^[10] specifies 'Set Features' command allows the user to enable it if the drive shall 'Enable write cache,' but does not specify the command to flush the cache.

ATA4 (section 8.10)^[11] specifies 'Flush Cache,' however should an error occur while executing the command, the disk will return the failing sector address and the sector is removed from cache. An alternative way to initiate flush cache does exist from ATA4 (section 8.37.9) and onwards: "When the subcommand disable write cache is issued, the device shall initiate the sequence to flush cache to non-volatile memory before command (see 8.10)."

See also

• Master-slave (computers)
• AHCI
• List of device bandwidths
• CE-ATA Consumer Electronics (CE) ATA [2]
• SATA
• FATA

Master/slave is a model for a communication protocol where one device or process has unidirectional control over one or more other devices. ... The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communicate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices such as host bus adapters which are designed to offer features not offered by Parallel ATA (PATA) controllers besides higher speeds, such as hot-plugging and native command queuing. ... This is a list of device bandwidths: the channel capacity (or, more informally, bandwidth) of some computer devices employing methods of data transport is listed by bit/s, kilobit/s (kbit/s), megabit/s (Mbit/s), or gigabit/s (Gbit/s) as appropriate and also MB/s or megabytes per... A SATA power connector. ...

References

1. ^ Large Disk HOWTO: History of BIOS and IDE limits.
2. ^ Welcome to Transcend website
3. ^ Rockbox - Unlocking a password protected harddisk
4. ^ c't 8/2005, S. 172: Hard Disk Security
5. ^ serialata - a comparison with ultra ata technology. www.serialata.org
6. ^ T10/05-239r0 SAT - Caching mode page. 070716 t10.org
7. ^ The story of the write cache and half a worm. 070716 java.net
8. ^ X3.221-1994. 070719 ftp.t10.org
9. ^ X3T10/0948D Information Technology - AT Attachment Interface with Extensions (ATA-2). 070719 t10.org
10. ^ X3T13 2008D Information Technology - AT Attachment-3 Interface (ATA-3). 070719 t10.org
11. ^ T13 1153D Information Technology - AT Attachment with Packet Interface Extension (ATA/ATAPI-4). 070719 t10.org

External links

• Overview and History of the IDE/ATA Interface
• ATA/ATAPI history
• Enhanced IDE/Fast-ATA/ATA-2 FAQ
• ATA/ATAPI FAQ
• Connecting IDE Hard Drives from mikeshardware.com
• Hard Drive Size Barriers
• T13 Technical Standards Group
• Computer Interface Help and Information
• How to solve one well known dma-mode problem in WinXP
• Seagate support using Cable Select
• PC Guide - Configuration Using Cable Select
• Unixwiz - Using IDE Cable Select
• U.S. Patent 6523071 discusses detailed use of pin 34 by host to distinguish 40 and 80 conductor cables
• Draft copy of ATA-ATAPI-5 standard, revision 3 dated 29 February 2000
• The truth about storage reliability 070726 S-ATA as reliable as SCSI