What is an Ultra DMA Hard Drive?
Though quickly losing favor in the world of modern computing, ultra DMA hard drives were once the standard for all desktop and laptop computing. Ultra DMA, also known as parallel ATA or PATA, is a physical interface protocol for connecting drive devices, such as hard drives and compact disc drives to a computer motherboard.
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History
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Ultra DMA was originally designed in 1986 by Western Digital, which appeared in Compaq computers initially. It was developed as "Integrated Drive Electronics" or "IDE" by Western Digital, and to this day these hard drives are referred to simply as "IDE" drives.
Features
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The ultra DMA or IDE drive was the first to have the drive's operating controller built into the hard drive as opposed to being required to have a controller built into the motherboard or use an add-in controller card. This controller handled all communication between the hard drive and the system bus.
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Fun Fact
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The term PATA or parallel ATA was not originally used by any company to describe the ultra DMA format. It was not until the SATA or serial ATA protocol was release that ultra DMA became known as parallel ATA.
Size
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The original parallel ATA specification only allowed for 28-bit addressing which limited the size of hard drives to 137GB. It was not until the release of parallel ATA version 6 that the hard drive size limit was raised above 137 GB to 144 PB (Peta-bytes).
Considerations
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The ultra DMA / parallel ATA hard drive standard has largely fallen out of favor to the serial ATA standard due to its much higher transfer speeds and features, such as hot swapping, which ultra DMA drives do not support.
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