EIDE - SATA terminology questions

[XCoalMiner]

I found this comparison chart of EIDE (they call it Parallel ATA?) and SATA on Seagate's website.

Came across it researching the specs on a new USB 2.0 external hardrive, the interface is listed as "ATA with Ultra ATA 133 interface", which I think just means it's just EIDE (is that correct)?

Can someone explain, or point me to a simple explanation, of all the various terminology used for these interfaces? For example, when one product says it has a 40-pin EIDE interface, is that the same as 'ATA with Ultra ATA 133 interface'?.

[slagmi]

40 pin is the standard IDE interface that you have seen for years.

Ultra ATA or ATA-133 requires a supported device on each end and an 80- pin conductor cable. But still uses 40- pin IDE interface.

Enhanced IDE was a maketing term that to the best of my knowledge was only ever used by Western Digital. Though it might be considered ATA-2, and Ultra ATA was built on ATA-2, it's not synonymous. Though most people will know what you really mean.

So, keeping in mind the above, to your last question I'll say 'yes'.

[Batuta]

...

[a31pguy]

Short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation 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: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.

# ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).

# ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.

# Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.

# ATA/66: A version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that doubles ATA's throughput to 66 MBps.

# ATA/100: An updated version of ATA/66 that increases data transfer rates to 100 MBps.

ATA also is called Parallel ATA. Contrast with Serial ATA.

Best reference material (beside wepopedia as qouted here) is Scott Muller's "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" now in it's 16th Edition. It's been an industry standard reference guide for a while.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... s&n=507846

and "Upgrading and Repairing Laptop Computers" also by Mr. Muller.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 07846&st=*

[slagmi]

XCoalMiner, unless you have a very,very new mainboard, you don't have an external SATA connector.

And because it's new, you won't find a book on it.

The external SATA plug is smaller that a standard USB plug and I've heard reports of people damaging hardware by trying to plug their FireWire stuff into it.

The device you were looking at likely uses the common SATA external KB-107 cable, but check before ordering. Add-In PCI and pcmcia cards are available now.