E-IDE?

[Shadow Conception]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827151133

This DVD Burner looks like a great deal, but it has a strange interface which I've never heard of. I have a Dell Dimension E310 with IDE and SATA interfaces, but the DVD Burner itself is "E-IDE". Is my Dell computer compatible with this burner? =\

 

[DaveSimmons]

Just another word used for IDE like PATA, ATA100, ATA133. IIRC it means it supports at least DMA33 instead of just PIO transfer but I'm too lazy to check. It will work fine with any motherboard IDE controller.

 

[Lord Evermore]

E-IDE was an unofficial standard created by Western Digital. It wasn't incompatible, it just added some features that the then-current ATA-2 standard didn't include, like ATAPI (non-hard disk devices) and specifying that the system should support 2 channels instead of 1. However as mentioned in that article, Western Digital didn't just make a single version of the standard so it continued to be referred to even with newer drives with newer features.

For most people E-IDE pretty much became synonymous with ATA/IDE, since they were completely compatible, but of course most people just say IDE since it's one letter less to type or say, and optical drives these days all support UltraATA modes which are part of ATA-4 and higher.

UltraDMA mode for 33MBps was years after than the introduction of E-IDE by the way.