Introduction to IDE

IDE stands for the integrated drive Electronics and it is a standardized connection type for the storage devices such as hard disks etc.  It is the most widely used hard drive interface in the today’s computer systems. IDE is used to connect the hard drives, optical drives and the tape drives to a computer. The initial IDE standards only supports the hard drive with 540 MB of data and today IDE supports the hard drive with more than 50 GB of the data.

Integrated Drive electronics is used for the mass storage drives and the controller is integrated into the hard drive and the CD-ROM. The new standard EIDE (enhanced integrated drive electronics) supports more capacity and data transfer rates as compared to the IDE.  The most popular implementations of the IDE interfaces in the computers are the serial ATA (SATA) and parallel ATA (PATA). 

IDE is good choice for most of the computers as compared to the SATA.  IDE drives can be configured as master and slave and the jumper pins can be used to make them master and slave.  The ATAPI (ATA Packet Interface) allows the CD-drives to run over the IDE/ATA interface.  A newer version of the IDE/ATA interface is ATA-2, which is used in the fast data transfer in the Enhanced IDE (EIDE).  Today most of the computers use EIDE standards for faster speed and better performance.