Popular Products > Electronics > IDE

IDE is an acronym for Integrated Drive Electronics, also known as the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA). IDE is the pivotal interface to which external peripheral devices like hard disks, solid state disks and CD-ROMs are plugged into your PC. This interface (the ATA or the IDE) was rechristened PATA (Parallel ATA) in early 2003 after the introduction of the Serial ATA onto the market.

Parallel ATA or IDE is based on parallel signalling and it replaced the redundant serial signalling technique. The Parallel ATA (PATA) interface had a limited workable cable length of 18 inches, although cables of 36 inches could sometimes be bought. This limited its usage as an internal storage interface. Despite this serious limitation, the PATA was one of the most commonly adopted and among the cheapest interfaces of its time.

Originally conceived as a PC/AT attachment, the IDE standard was rechristened as the Advanced Technology Attachment to avoid trademark related infringements. The reason for its name lay in the fact that the IDE had an internally embedded drive controller as opposed to an independent controller attached to the motherboard. The standout feature of the PC/AT or the IDE attachment was a direct connection to the 16-bit AT bus.

The Enhanced IDE (EIDE) was an addition to the original ATA and made hard disks of more than 528MB capacities accessible to other devices. With support capabilities of up to 8.4GB, the EIDE supported direct memory access, which enabled faster access to the hard drive. This was later replaced by the Serial ATA in 2003 and was finally topped by the Parallel ATA.

When initially conceived, the IDE interface worked only with hard disk drives. Later, it was developed to support all forms of removable media, including CD-ROMs, DVD ROMs, tape drives, larger capacity ZIP drives and super disks. The ATA/IDE specification initially used 28-bit addresses. This allowed the hard drive to address almost 228 sectors up to a capacity of 137GB. The standard BIOS configuration supported almost 8.46GB. This led to the introduction of 48-bit addressing, which increased the capacity to 144 petabytes. Support for EIDE or IDE was not integrated into many operating systems like Windows 2000 until later versions were launched.