What is an ATA or IDE Hard Drive

What is an ATA or IDE Hard Drive

This drive is more commonly called the IDE  (Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics). This is by far at the moment the most commonly used type of hard drive out there.  primarily used in desktops.  This drive will soon become a thing of the past being replaced by its new cousin the SATA (Serial-Advanced Technology Attachment).  ATA is limited in a few areas.  The first is that it is limited to 133mbps (megabytes per second) data transfer rate.  Secondly, it has a very bulky 40 pin data cable versus the SATA 4 pin much smaller cable.  With that said ATA has all been called Parallel ATA for its size.  IDE connection types require a jumper to set the type of drive whether it is a master, slave, or cable select.  Below are some pictures of an IDE/ATA hard drive.

IDE Hard Driveide cableAs you can see in the images on this page, the cable is not exactly small, an ide cable measures about 2″ wide.  This can cause a air flow problem in a chassis.  Today’s computers need a lot of air flow to reduce heat traps, unless you have water cooled system  these ribbons restrict air flow.  IDE/ATA is an obsolete technology and has limited use in legacy application/computers.

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