Generally, someone working on their home PC only needs to be familiar with IDE/ATA and SATA. IDE stand for integrated drive electronics. IDE hard disk was created by western digital in the late 1980s and is still used in many computers today. In fact it is probably the most common drive on the planet next to SCSI which is primarily used in server system or high end work stations such as video editing machines. ATA simply stand for AT Attachment and is the stander interface for connecting storage devise created and is still maintained today by X3/INCITS committee T13. Although they technically have different meanings, many computer industry or IT people terms ATA, IDE, ATAPI or UDMA Interchangeably. The original IDE/ATA design was a parallel architecture. With the introduction of serial ATA or SATA almost all computer professionals now refer to IDE drive as PATA or parallel ATA. The drive referenced in figure 1 is a Serial ATA drive from Western Digital.
One of the first obvious physical differences between PATA and sata drives is the power connectors (shown in figure 2). PATA drives use the older 4 pin power connectors (right) that have been used since the late 1970s. SATA on the other hand uses a newer and much smaller 15 pin power connector (right). If your PC does not have the correct power connector, adapters are available to coveter PATA to SATA power and vice versa. These can be purchased on line or at most any computer store that sells hard disk separately for under $.00 USD. Other than physical form factor, there is no difference in the power supplied to the drives as some other on line sources indicate.
Some SATA drives will include both power connecters on the drives is self which is useful if you are upgrading on older PC from PATA to SATA.
DATA CABLES
Figure 3 show that data transfer cables also differ between PATA (right). PATA uses what is commonly referred to as a 40-pin ribbon cable? Some newer PATA drives will use any 80-pin cable which helps reduce interference form RF and other sources but still uses those standard 40-pin connectors. PATA cables will only have one connecter for the system main board or IDE controller and tow for connecting hard disk (one master and one slave, discussed later in this article). SATA cable will only have only tow 7-pin connectors and will be much smaller inside. SATA drives connect directly to the system main board or SATA control, one drive per cable. This provides dedicate band with to each hard disk for higher performance operation. The smaller size of the SATA cables allows for easier routing in smaller PC such as the shuttle XPC and keeps the cables from blocking airflow providing a batter environment inside the case for cooling the internal components.
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