ATA

ATA is short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself, freeing up space on the motherboard. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee.
ATA itself is known also as IDE, and supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
ATA also is called Parallel ATA, or PATA, in contrast it with Serial ATA, or SATA.