Just like we have new and improved software being developed for various purposes we have the computer hardware evolving at an equally fast pace. Amongst the different things related to hardware that has cropped up in recent years is the ATA.

This is a new and improved technology that has replaced the old school technologies such as RLL, ESDI and MFM. In today’s time ATA stands shoulder to shoulder with SCSI in competition.

Basically ATA can be classified as a specification which is used to attach hard drives to the AT bus. This AT specification has been extended and now has the capacity to include other storage. These include CD/DVD drives, zip drives, tape drives, Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface and other additions to the specification.

The term ATA is widely used interchangeably with IDE which stands for Integrated Drive Electronics. Similarly the term Parallel Advanced Technology Attachments is also considered to be one and the same thing. The initially produced Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment cables used to have forty wires. Further development resulted in the production of the ATA-5 cables which had twice the amount of wires. This then became the standard.

Ironically though, the wires that were used to carry out the signals were only forty. The added forty had a different purpose altogether. Basically the newly added wires were introduced to provide a ground wire for each of the signal wires. As a result of these grounding wires the ATA subsystem can now operate at a much higher speed and its reliability has also increased.

Of ATA Masters and Slaves
One ATA bus can be used to support two storage devices. But naturally the first storage device that you use is referred to as the master whereas the second storage device is considered to be the slave.

Users have the option to choose between two methods in order to configure and assign the role of master and slave to the two storage devices. They can either make use of drive jumpers or cable select.

The original method that was used to configure the master slave relationship was through drive jumpers. These involved placing or removing jumpers on each of the storage devices. But naturally each drive manufacturer and model has its own jumper definition which is different from the others. You will find the jumper setting to be printed on the drive from before. In case it is not there you can find it in the drive manual or on the web page of the manufacturer.

You will have to set some drives as Single Drive and others to be the Master in a single drive configuration. Similarly in a dual drive configuration one takes the position of master and the other of slave.

Cable Select is the newer standard for achieving the same purpose. In this way the roles of slave and master are assigned by the position of the drives on the drive cable. Both your ATA cable and the drives should support cable select in order for it to work.