eide and ide?

[NewCompGeek]

what is the difference?

 

[Pariah]

nothing. EIDE is a term WD coined to describe their enhancements to the ATA-1 spec. The terms are pretty much used interchangeably despite not really describing the same thing.

 

[John]

Eide = enhanced to support 528Mbytes, faster access to the hard drive/optical devices, and supports Direct Memory Access (DMA),

 

[NewCompGeek]

so i can use a eide hd on my ide mobo? great!

 

[Pariah]

Yes you can, though I don't think true "enhanced IDE" drives are still manufactured, they have since be long replaced with more current ATA specs.

EIDE did not add supported for larger than 504MB drives. Enhanced BIOS did which is not related to EIDE. Confusing to say the least. EIDE added support for ATAPI devices (non hard drives), dual channel support and most of the features including increased transfer rates that were eventually introduced in ATA-2. Also the original ATA spec had both single and multiword DMA modes in it, so EIDE didn't add DMA support either, it just introduced faster versions.

 

[John]

Pariah, maybe you can write the people at whatis.com to correct their errors.


http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213931,00.html

 

[Pariah]

They really butchered that one. They don't even mention that WD developed it. It was no adopted as ATA-2 even though it had a lot of the same features. They also mention Fast-ATA, which was developed by Quantum in response to WD's EIDE, and again had basically the same features as both EIDE and the ATA-2 spec. For whatever reason, WD continues to use the term EIDE for all of its drives, despite it not really meaning anything, while Quantum drop the "Fast ATA" moniker a long time ago.

 

[eplebnista]

Here is a link to a IDE/EIDE/ATA History Timeline.

My $.02,
eplebnista