What is IDE/ATA Hard Drive?
ATA (ATA) is a parallel interface standard for the connection of storage devices such as hard disks, solid-state drives, and CD-ROM drives in computers. The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee[1]. It uses the underlying AT Attachment and AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATA/ATAPI) standards, and is often incorrectly referred to as "PATA".The current ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development. ATA/ATAPI is an evolution of the AT Attachment Interface, which was itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital's original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations exist, including abbreviations such as IDE which are still in common informal use. Serial ATA was introduced to the market in 2003, and the original ATA has declined in use since. However, it is still a common standard in Personal Computers.
ATA only allows cable lengths up to 457.20 mm (18.00 in). Because of this length limit the technology normally appears as an internal computer storage interface. For many years ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application. By the beginning of 2007, it had largely been replaced by Serial ATA (SATA) in new systems.
What is IDE/ATA Hard Drive?
Integrated Device Electronics. It is the most widely-used hard drive interface on the market. The fancy name refers to how the IDE technology "integrates" the electronics controller into the drive itself. The IDE interface, which could only support drives up to 540 MB has been replaced by the superior EIDE (Enhanced-IDE) technology which supports over 50 GB and allows for over twice as fast data transfer rates. The other most common hard drive interface is SCSI, which is faster than EIDE, but usually costs more.
Although it really refers to a general technology, most people use the term to refer the ATA specification, which uses this technology.
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