Originally posted by: Pariah
You can pretty much blame western digital for this mix up. They came up with the term EIDE, for enhanced IDE as a marketting gimmick. Just like Maxtor came up with ATA133. Both companies whipped it out of their asses through their marketting department.
When EIDE was initially introduced by WD, it was indeed different from the ATA standard available at the time and added truly useful additional features,
No, it was purely a marketing term, no different than Intel's "Centrino".
EIDE meant support for two IDE channels, each supporting two devices; support for fast ATA transfer modes, and support for ATAPI devices.
The same way that "Centrino" means a Pentium-M CPU, an Intel system chipset, and an (I guess Intel) wireless networking device.
Originally posted by: Pariahmany of which would appear in the ATA-2 spec. For this reason, EIDE was not initially a marketing gimick or derived from their marketing department but a legitimately different standard which never really was an official standard.
It was a marketing standard, comprised of a list of bullet-point technical features. It was not a technical standard, in and of itself.
Originally posted by: PariahQuantum developed their own competing standard which they call Fast-ATA. After Fast-ATA2, Quantum got rid of the name
Both of those were Quantum's proprietary marketing terms, for speeds/features that eventually made their way into the official ATA standards.
Originally posted by: Pariahwhile WD continues to use EIDE despite the fact it is no longer different from the current ATA spec, nor has it been for years.
If "EIDE" is a real technical standard, and is no longer different than the current ATA spec, then why did you write about that it was "never really an official standard"? That seems contradictory.
Originally posted by: Pariah
That is misleading. There are still some very big differences between SCSI and ATA. Although there are some electronics integrated into a SCSI drive, the controller still handles most of the processing, unlike ATA, which depends more on the CPU but has most of the controller integrated into the drive.
It's not misleading, because the IDE acronym was adopted due to the
physical characteristics of ATA drives which are no longer unique to the standard, not due to any abilities or features of the interface.
Yes, the fact that the drive controller electronics were directly attached to the drive itself, instead of being a seperate board attached to the host bus interface, and attached to the drive via a number of ribbon cables, each sensitive to interference. (Since one of them contained analog signals, that was a major issue.)
Doesn't anyone here remember MFM and RLL drives and controllers?
(ESDI was also an "IDE" drive, IIRC, but not an ATA one.)
Edit: Forgot to mention, one other feature of WD's "EIDE", was support in the system BIOS for geometry-translation (early "LBA mode"), to support HDs larger than 525MB. Actually, that rather proves that it was a marketing standard rather than a technical one, because DOS/BIOS-level interfaces were a defacto IBM PC implementation standard, and not under the technical purview of the ATA standards group.
Facebook
Twitter