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Welcome! This site is mainly for people developing an ATA or ATAPI product or designing a product that will use an ATA or ATAPI device. And this site is for anyone seeking up-to-date and correct information about the ATA and ATAPI interfaces.
ATA and ATAPI are the real names for the mass storage device interface that is frequently called IDE and EIDE. IDE and EIDE are mostly used by marketing people who do not know what they are selling and by writers for magazines who do not know what they are writing about. Please check out the list of GOOD and BAD information sources shown below.
So what does ATA mean? It stands for AT Attachment but most people don't remember what an AT is anymore (anyone remember the IBM PC/AT?). And what about ATAPI? It stands for ATA Packet Interface.
ATA/ATAPI is the most popular device interface today. Of the approximately 140 million hard disk drives made in the last year, 90+ percent are ATA. The remainder are various types of SCSI inteface drives. And the vast majority of CD-ROM drives are ATAPI devices. Most PCMCIA and CFA mass storage devices are also ATA or ATAPI devices.
The ATA and ATA/ATAPI standards are developed and published by:
T13 is the actual standards committee that develops and maintains the ATA and ATA/ATAPI standards. Visit the T13 web site for the latest information on meeting schedules, proposals for the next version of ATA/ATAPI and copies of the draft standards to review. T13 is always looking for review comments from anyone. You do not need to be a member of T13 to attend a T13 meeting or to submit a comment on any of the committee's proposals or documents.
Here is the true and correct history of ATA and ATAPI:
You need to be really careful when using any source of information about ATA, ATAPI, IDE and EIDE. Please check out these lists of GOOD and BAD information sources:
There is another popular(?) mass storage device interface called SCSI. SCSI has its ups and downs, mostly down recently, as the prices of SCSI host adapters and devices remain very high compared to ATA/ATAPI.
SCSI has changed a lot of the years. SCSI is basically a generalized device interface that defines the structure of commands, the way those commands are executed, and the way status is processed. SCSI has many physical interfaces, such as the old Parallel Interface, Fiber Channel, IEEE 1394, and ATA/ATAPI. ATAPI is one of the many SCSI physical transport layers. So an ATAPI device is really a SCSI device using a simple, cheap and high speed physical interface.
If you are looking for the SCSI command set used by ATAPI CD-ROM or DVD devices then you should go to the T10 site and find the MMC or MMC-2 documents. Please note that the old SFF-8020 (INF-8020) document is now obsolete. SFF-8020 (INF-8020) has been replaced by the T13 ATA/ATAPI-4 standard (for the interface and command protocol descriptions) and by the T10 MMC or MMC-2 standards (for the SCSI command set).
The SCSI standards are published by ANSI NCITS Technical Committee 10, or just T10:
Here you will find Hale's HIW How It Works documents and Hale's ATA and ATAPI test software.
How to contact Hale Landis:
Notice to anyone providing a link to this site: This site replaces all of the email addresses at sugs.talisman.com (such as info@sugs.talisman.com). Please update the links on your web pages and please provide a link only to http://ata-atapi.com or to http://www.ata-atapi.com. Any other link, including links that specify additional directory or file information, are subject to change and may not work in the future.
This site is hosted by: Eklektix, Inc, providers of Linux consulting and education services and publishers of the Linux Weekly News. If you are not reading the Linux Weekly News every week then you should start today!
And... ATA-ATAPI.COM has some heavy duty anti-spam filtering, visit Ironhand The Spam Buster.
But wait! We can not forget this: Yep, this site is Y2K compliant!
© Copyleft 1998, 1999, 2000 by Hale Landis.
This page was last updated on 16 February 2000.