Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE)

Last Updated: April 24, 2013

Definition - What does Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE) mean?

Enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE) is the hard drive interface that succeeded integrated device electronics (IDE), also known as ATA or ATA-1. The interface acts as an intermediary between the computer and a mass storage device. EIDE provides much faster transfer rates than IDE. The term was coined by Western Digital in 1994 to refer to a set of extensions for the ATA-1 attachment standard. EIDE is sometimes called fast ATA or fast IDE or ATA-2. EIDE has since been replaced by other standards that offer faster transfer rates.

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Techopedia explains Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics (EIDE)

The original IDE drive controllers supported a transfer rate of up to 8.3 MBps, while EIDE supported a rate of up to 16.6 MBps. However, some sources list the transfer speed at around four times as fast on average. The IDE standard could also support mass storage devices of up to 8.4 GB. This is a large contrast to only 528 MB that IDE supported.