View Full Version : What makes ATA, ATA and not IDE?
03-02-2003, 07:44 AM
So if the only difference between an ATA133 cable and a standard IDE cable is 80 conductors, with 40 data and 40 ground between each data pair, why is that enough to allow the 80 conductor to have so much more bandwidth on an IDE channel? And if the ground wires are actually grounded to the chassis with an external ground wire, what difference would that make?
Theres less crosstalk between the wires (and they are smaller) which makes for a much more stable/reliable data path.
03-02-2003, 10:45 AM
IDE is "Integrated Drive Electronics"
and ATA is "Advanced Technology Attachment"
Basically IDE is the disk type, and ATA is the interface type for the IDE disk. so a disk can be both IDE and ATA at the same time.
and as we all know, there are two major types of ATA at the moment: Parallel ATA PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA).
what the original post is referring to above is merely the difference between ATA33 and ATA66/100/133 (as Sieb correctly pointed out) with the ground channels implemented to reduce feedback between data causing magneic fields in neighbournig wires. much like the 4 extra wires in twisted pair cat5 and cat5e ethernet cable, which do exactly the same job.
01-14-2006, 01:00 PM
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