Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
refinement and official publication under ANSI. The ATA-7 and ATA-8 standards incor-
porate both parallel and serial interfaces.
The rules these committees operate under are designed to ensure that voluntary industry
standards are developed by the consensus of people and organizations in the affected in-
dustry. INCITS specifically develops information processing system standards, whereas
ANSIapprovestheprocessunderwhichthesestandardsaredevelopedandthenpublishes
them.BecauseT13isessentiallyapublicorganization,alltheworkingdrafts,discussions,
and meetings of T13 are open for all to see.
Copies of any of the published standards can be purchased from ANSI (
www.ansi.org
)
or the IHS Standards Store (formerly Global Engineering Documents -
ht-
tp://global.ihs.com
)
. Draft versions of 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,olderATA-1andATA-2devicesworkfineonATA-6andATA-8interfaces.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
