If you're working with some legacy equipment,
you may find storage devices inside
of those computers that are connected with a ribbon cable
just like this one.
This is a connectivity called PATA or the Parallel AT
Attachment.
You might also see this referred to as Parallel ATA
or simply ATA.
The name AT Attachment comes from one
of the original PCs created by IBM, which
was the PC/AT and the AT attachment standard
was the one used to connect drives within that system.
There have been a number of different versions of PATA
through the years.
And originally we didn't even call it PATA.
We called it IDE or Integrated Drive Electronics.
This was a name created by the hard drive manufacturer Western
Digital.
They even had an updated version of IDE
called Enhanced IDE or EIDE.
Through the years, the speeds of PATA continued to improve
and you can find versions of PATA
that range from 16 megabytes per second
through 133 megabytes per second as a total throughput.
There are also other drives that can connect to PATA,
not just hard drives.
You may even find CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs that have a PATA
connection on those as well.
So although you may find motherboards
and other equipment that are referring to an ATA
drive or an IDE connection, today we
refer to all of these as Parallel ATA or PATA.
Here's an image of two different types of PATA cables.
The one on the top is a 40 wire PATA cable
and the one on the bottom is an 80 wire PATA cable.
With both of these cables, there is a connection
on one end that is a 40 pin connector for the motherboard
and then there are two separate 40 pin connectors
later on down the ribbon cable.
On the 40 wire cable, the first device that you would connect
is referred to as device 0 in the PATA standard.
And the device connecting on the end of the cable is device one.
Those two are swapped on the 80 wire cable.
Device one is the first interface on the cable
and device 0 is at the end.
The 40 wire cable was the original PATA cable.
And then as we increase the speeds for PATA,
we needed some way to decrease the amount of crosstalk
between all of these wires, so we doubled the number of wires
while keeping the number of pins on the connectors exactly
the same.
And this minimizes the crosstalk over these higher speeds
that are used over 80 wire cables.
This is a 40 wire cable.
And if we put an 80 wire cable right next to it,
you can see visually they're quite different, because the 80
wire cable obviously has twice the number of wires
inside of the ribbon cable.
The PATA connectors are also quite large
relative to the SATA connectors you
might already be familiar with.
This motherboard has a PATA connector right at the bottom
and it's quite large compared to the other connectors.
If we zoom up, we can see all 40 pins inside of that connector.
And you'll notice that one of the pins is missing.
That's because this 40 pin connector is symmetrical.
So that missing pin allows us to properly
orient the cable into the right format
when we're plugging it into that connector.
You might also notice there's a notch at the bottom
as well, which also helps when orienting the cable.
If you look at the end of the cable,
you'll see how this works.
There's a notch built into the PATA cable.
And you can see in all of these PATA connectors
that we are missing that hole that's in the connection
so that you couldn't possibly plug it
in in the wrong orientation.
Here's a better look at the interface on the motherboard.
You can easily see that there is a notch at the bottom.
And there's your missing pin right
in the middle of the PATA connector.
The connector that you would find on a storage device
is identical to the connector that you
would find on a motherboard.
It's this 40 pin symmetrical connector.
You can see the notch in the bottom and the missing pin
right in the middle of the PATA connector.
As I mentioned earlier, PATA is a legacy technology.
It's not one you'd commonly find in our newer systems.
But if you do run into one of these 40 pin ribbon cables,
then it's probably a PATA device that you're working with.
Next to this PATA data cable is a SATA data cable.
And you can see that it is much smaller than this very
large ribbon cable used for PATA,
and it takes up much less space inside
of our systems than this older PATA technology.