sata (and older pata) hard drives use the advanced technology attachment (ata) protocol to issue commands, such as read, write, and status. aoe encapsulates those commands inside ethernet frames and lets them travel over an ethernet network instead of a sata or 40-pin ribbon cable. although internally aoe uses the ata protocol, it presents the disks as scsi to the operating system. also the actual disks can be scsi or any other kind, aoe is not limited to disks that use the ata command set. by using an aoe driver, the host operating system is able to access a remote disk as if it were directly attached.