Are disk drives the only ATA devices?
No. Over the years there have been ATA tape drives, ATA CD-ROMS and other strange devices. Most of these are expected to be added to an existing ATA host adapter as the second device (device 1) with an existing ATA disk drive (device 0). In general these require software drivers to operate with your OS. Now, we have ATAPI CD-ROM and tape devices that can be placed on an ATA host adapter. And soon we should see system motherboard BIOS support for booting from an ATAPI CD-ROM device. The general idea is that an ATAPI device can coexist with an ATA device on the same cable.
