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Parallel ATA

This is actually the IDE technology, recently known as the Parallel ATA. In abbreviation called as the PATA. Earlier the term as SATA was used to refer to most of the serial devices like the hard disk, CD Drive etc. Hence to differentiate between the serial devices and the parallel ones the name as PATA or the Parallel ATA was given.

It eliminated the need for a separate adaptor card, Hence the introduction of Parallel ATA was a significant advancement in the technology. Another major advancement regarding this was that it was quite cheaply available, the comparison being made for the SCSI which is one of the traditional drives. Also some of the major advantages were that it was easier to configure and it has the feature of enabling the lookahead cache.

ATA cables or the so called bus is a bundle of about 40 wires ribbon cable or 80 wires ribbon cable or so. And in the motherboard the ATA sockets are connected on the motherboard are below the RAM.

Parallel ATA pins: 1 – Reset, 2 – Ground, 3 - Data 7, 4 - Data 8, 5 - Data 6, 6 -Data 9, 7 - Data 5, 8 - Data 10, 9 - Data 4, 10 - Data 11, 11 - Data 3, 12 - Data 12, 13 - Data 2, 14 - Data 13,15 - Data 1, 16 - Data 14, 17 - Data 0, 18 - Data 15, 19 – Ground, 20 – Key, 21 – DDRQ, 22 – Ground, 23 - I/O Write, 24 – Ground, 25 - I/O Read, 26 – Ground, 27 - IOC HRDY, 28 - Cable Select, 29 – DDACK, 30 – Ground, 31 – IRQ, 32 - No Connect, 33 - Addr 1, 34 - GPIO_DMA66_Detect, 35 - Addr 0, 36 - Addr 2, 37 - Chip Select 1P, 38 - Chip Select 3P, 39 – Activity, 40 – Ground.

This PATA was standardized in the year of 1990. It had a length of about 18 inches or around 450 mm. The transfer of data is around 66 Mega bytes per second. It uses a Parallel data channel from the controller of the disk drives and hence the name as it sounds.

The transfer is in the mode of DMA that is Direct Memory Access. The advanced features may include the UDMA which stands for the Ultra Direct Memory Access.

Actually in the earlier period IDE was a separate card; but as the days passed by it became an embedded part of the motherboard.

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