Alongside with SCSI, ATA is one of the major storage interfaces. The ATA standard defines the command parameters and physical interfaces. This allows host adapters and hard disks from various manufactures to work together correctly. ATA has two interface variants: serial ATA (SATA) and the original parallel ATA (PATA) also known as IDE. On top of the (S)ATA interface the ATAPI interface has been defined which defines the command set for non-hard disk devices like optical drives and tape streamers. Sometimes these are called Parallel ATAPI (PATAPI or Serial SATA (SATAPI)

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