What Is Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA)?

A long time ago, the world was full of floppy disks and hard drives connected to the motherboard with a cable. Then along came Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA), and it was like, "Whoa, you can plug all your hard drives directly into the motherboard!" This was a huge deal because it meant you didn't have to spend hours trying to get your computer to recognize that you'd plugged in an external device—it just worked. And after that, there were no more worries about whether or not you had enough room on your floppy disk for all your files. But times change, and now some people don't even use physical devices anymore. The world has moved on! If you're a computer nerd, you may have heard of ATA. But if you're like most people, you might be wondering what it is. ATA is also known as Integrated Device Electronics (IDE) and is referred to as ATA with Packet Interface (ATAPI). It's a protocol that allows for communication between the PC and its hard drive or other mass storage device. ATA is what lets your computer read information from your hard drive. Without it, you wouldn't be able to access any of the files on your hard drive. When you think of a storage device, what comes to mind? If you're like most people, it's probably something like this: a box or maybe a hard drive. Perhaps even an external USB drive or something. But did you know that there's another kind of storage device? And it's called ATA! It might not look like much—just a series of thin wires merged within a cable bus—but it's incredible. It was designed to connect supported, integrated, and portable storage devices without the need for an external controller. In other words, it can connect itself directly to your computer without any extra help from outside sources. Initially, ATA supported parallel communication and was called Parallel ATA (PATA). It consisted of a 40-pin controller cable and a data transfer speed of 16-32 bits at a time. However, in computer systems developed, PATA was replaced by Serial ATA (SATA), which has faster data I/O rates.