Q. What is Enhanced IDE?

The principle behind EIDE interface is the same as in IDE interface however this drive has capacities varying from 10.2GB to 20.5GB. The rotation speed is 7200RPM. Its feature includes 9.5ms access time, a 2MB buffer and support for Ultra ATA/66 interface for high speed data throughput and greater data integrity.

Modern EIDE interfaces allow much faster communication. Speed increases because of improvements in protocol that describes how clock cycles will be used to address devices and transfer data. Modern EIDE hard drives are ATA/66 and Ultra DMA.

• Ultra DMA or ATA/33 (AT Attachment): ATA standard is the formal specification for how EIDE and IDE interfaces are supposed to work with hard drives. ATA33 allows up to 33.3 million bytes of data to be transferred every second therefore the name ATA33.
• ATA/66: ATA66 allows up to 66.7 million bytes of data to be transferred each second, therefore name ATA66 doubles the ATA33.