Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
the standards can be downloaded from the T13 Committee or Serial ATA International Organization
(SATA-IO) website.
Each newer version of ATA is backward compatible with the previous versions. In other words,
older ATA-1 and ATA-2 devices work fine on ATA-7 and ATA-8 interfaces. ATA-7 and ATA-8
include both PATA and SATA. Newer versions of ATA are normally built on older versions, and
with few exceptions can be thought of as extensions of the previous versions. This means that ATA-8,
for example, is generally considered equal to ATA-7 with the addition of some features.
Table 7.2
breaks down the various ATA standards. The following sections describe recent ATA
versions in more detail.
Table 7.2. ATA Standards
ATA-1 (ATA Interface for Disk Drives)
ATA-1 defined the original ATA interface, which was an integrated bus interface between disk
drives and host systems based on the ISA (AT) bus. These major features were introduced and
documented in the ATA-1 specification:
• 40/44-pin connectors and cabling
• Master/slave or cable select drive configuration options
• Signal timing for basic Programmed I/O (PIO) and direct memory access (DMA) modes
• Cylinder, head, sector (CHS) and logical block address (LBA) drive parameter translations
supporting drive capacities up to 2
28
-2
20
(267,386,880) sectors, or 136.9GB
