Oracle Tips by Burleson

Disk I/O Tuning

Chapter 2: ATA Interface

ATA is short for Advanced Technology Attachment. ATA is a disk drive interface that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:

• ATA: Which is also known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives per cable, a 16-bit interface and PIO (Parallel IO) modes 0, 1 and 2. ATA is also IDE which is an abbreviation for either Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics, depending on who you ask. The IDE interface is an interface for mass storage devices, where the controller is integrated into the disk or CD-ROM drive. Although it really refers to a general technology, most people use the term to refer the ATA specification, which uses this technology.
   

• ATA-2: This ATA mode supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and the multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). ATA-2 also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is usually marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE) which is a newer version of the IDE mass storage device interface standard developed by Western Digital Corporation. ATA-2 will support data transfer rates in a range of 4 and 16.6 Mbps, about three to four times faster than the old IDE standard. In addition, it can support mass storage devices with capacities of up to 8.4 gigabytes, whereas the old standard was limited to 528 MB. Due to its lower cost, enhanced EIDE has replaced SCSI in many areas.