

Vendors often use ATA to refer to the original technology. The new standard brought with it a renaming of the original interface from ATA to Parallel ATA ( PATA) because it's based on parallel signaling technology, whereas SATA is based on serial signaling technology.ĭespite the new label, many continued to use ATA to refer to the first interface, while others started to use PATA. The introduction of Serial ATA ( SATA) - the command and transport standard that succeeded the first ATA - only muddied the waters further. Since then, it has become a generally accepted practice to treat them as one in the same, even if it could be argued that they are not.

After ANSI standardized the technology, the terms ATA and IDE started to be used interchangeably. The IDE technology was developed in the 1980s by Western Digital and Compaq as part of an effort to combine the storage controller and drive into a single device. The ATA standard is maintained by the T13 Committee of the International Committee on Information Technology Standards, an ANSI-accredited forum for creating technology standards. In November 1990, the American National Standards Institute ( ANSI) standardized the IDE technology, referring to it as Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA).

The IDE interface was originally based on the IBM PC Industry Standard Architecture 16-bit bus standard, but it has since been implemented in computers that use other bus standards. IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) is an electronic interface standard that defines the connection between a bus on a computer's motherboard and the computer's disk storage devices. What is IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics)?
