Advanced Technology Attachment, is a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. Serial ATA (SATA, abbreviated from Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives.
ATA and IDE are the same. IDE is short for Integrated Drive Electronics or IBM Disc Electronics, It is a standard interface for IBM compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The primary benefit of IDE is that it's nearly universally supported. Almost every motherboard has IDE connectors. A typical motherboard has two IDE connectors, and each connector can support a single channel of up to two drives on the same cable. That means you're limited to four IDE devices per system, unless you add an expansion board containing another IDE interface. In contrast, with SCSI you can have up to seven devices, including drives, per interface, roughly double or quadruple that on some types of IDE. Performance also may suffer when certain IDE devices share an interface. It's recommended that you pair like devices on a channel. Otherwise the slower device can have a negative impact on the faster one. SCSI drives are much more efficient with this type of transfer.
Starting with ATA-4, a new technology was introduced called UltraDMA, supporting transfer modes capable of rates of up to 33MBps.
ATA-5 supports UltraDMA/66, with transfer modes having rates of up to 66MBps. To achieve this high rate, the drive must have a special ribbon cable (still with only 40 pins, however), and the motherboard or IDE controller card must support ATA-5.
ATA-6 supports UltraDMA/100, with transfer modes capable of up to 100MBps.
ATA-7 supports UltraDMA/133, with transfer modes of 133MBps and up to 150MBps for serial ATA.
ATA-8 made only minor revisions to ATA-7 and also supports UltraDMA/133 and 150MBps SATA as well as the potential for the next generation of SATA, with throughput in excess of 500MBps.
If an ATA-5 or ATA-6 drive is used with a normal 40-wire cable or is used on a system that doesn't support the higher-speed modes, it reverts to the ATA-4 performance level.