ATA's ribbon cables have had 40 wires for most of its history (44 conductors for the smaller form-factor version used for 2.5" drives), but an 80-wire version appeared with the introduction of the
Ultra DMA/33 (
UDMA) mode. All of the additional wires in the new cable are
ground wires, interleaved with the previously defined wires to reduce the effects of
capacitive coupling between neighboring signal wires, reducing
crosstalk. Capacitive coupling is more of a problem at higher transfer rates, and this change was necessary to enable the 66 megabytes per second (MB/s) transfer rate of
UDMA4 to work reliably. The faster
UDMA5 and
UDMA6 modes also require 80-conductor cables.
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