Like what the question says, does everyone who took the current A+ exams remember if there was any question about PATA?

PATA is still a viable standard and likely will remain so for quite sometime. It has been the standard since the 90's, at least. that means there is a huge installed base and people don't just toss computers ... at least most consumers don't.

Most enterprise systems have made the transition - they have a much faster turn-over, based on lifecycle, MTBF. To them data is the commodity, so protecting the intergrity of the data overrules the cost of replacing a suspect drive. A data loss or data corruption failure costs much than replacing a drive, before it fails.

Short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:

•ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
•ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).
•ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.
•Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.
•ATA/66: A version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that doubles ATA's throughput to 66 MBps.
•ATA/100: An updated version of ATA/66 that increases data transfer rates to 100 MBps.
ATA also is called Parallel ATA. Contrast with Serial ATA

Thank you for the information, but I have a question: Do I have to know how many conductors a PATA has? I know SATA has 7 conductors, and I remember that the practice question asks what is a cable that has 7 conductors or something.

IDE is 40 wire EIDE is 80 wires (the additional 40 are actually buffers, to prevent cross talk, needed to reliably reach the speed of EIDE, not active in transmission of data - compatible with IDE, at reduced speeds)

http://pinouts.ru/HD/AtaInternal_pinout.shtml

In 1994 Western Digital introduced Enhanced IDE (EIDE) or ATA-2 drives.

Roughly 2007-2009 Serial ATA or SATA largely replaced ATA/ATAPI technology on motherboards, leading to ATA being renamed PATA for Parallel ATA. SATA uses the same command set as PATA, but it uses high-speed serial cables moving data at 1.5, 3.0, and 6.0 Gbps.a

Might as well learn pinouts of EIDE and Floppy cable while you are at it. Not likely to be on the exam but might as well stretch your mind... in for a penny - in for a pound.

http://cromwell-intl.com/technical/ata- ... nouts.html