ATA/ATAPI Protocol

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ATA is commonly used to refer to the family of parallel bus protocols and extensions including FastATA, IDE, EIDE, ATAPI and Ultra DMA. The bus evolved in the mid 1980's from previous hard drive interfaces. The enhancements since its inception, were primarily to increase speed, add to its capabilities, and provide support to new devices. It's primary use is as an interface with hard disk drives and optical drives, such as CDROMs.

The most recent revision of the specification, ATAPI 7, includes UDMA mode 6, also known as Ultra DMA 133, providing 133MB/sec throughput.

Future innovations in ATA technology will be found in the new bus protocol, Serial ATA (SATA), a serial version with a roadmap of much faster speeds.

To learn more about ATA/ATAPI, visit the following website:

  www.T13.org