Integrated Device Electronics (IDE) is the most popular and widely utilized interface of hard disk drive. The name IDE depicts the electronic controller and technology integrated into the hard disk drive. IDE interface has been extended and enhanced IDE (EIDE) technology has been introduced whose data transfer speed is twice in comparison to the IDE drives. IDE hard drives were the pioneers in which the logical controller was it integrated onto the hard drive. This new change in the hard disk drives resolved most of the problems that were related to the hard drives like complexity and indigent signal integrity. The first drives in which the controllers were integrated did not use technically utilize the IDE interface as it is now used in the IDE hard drives.



Those 3.5 inch hard drives were directly mounted to the ?controller-card? and called as hard cards. The card was then plugged into Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) slot. They were mostly used by those consumers who needed to extend the storage capacity of their existing precious systems. With the integration of controller and disk, the users can insert package into their existing personal computer systems just as they can add peripheral. During all this process the existing controller and hard drive were not affected. There were several problems with the hard-cards. The hard drives can not be mounted in slots as the modem or the video card. Physical support for card extension was indigent as they had problems of vibrations because one screw was used to hold them in place. The hard card drives had problem of cooling and were too wide and they used 2 bus slots as one of the bus slots was blocked.

Soon after the manufactures and designers came to know that the hard drives did not have to be physically kept onto the controller. Then the controller was placed at the hard drive's bottom and the whole controller assembly and the hard disk was moved to regular drive bay. Cable was used to maintain the connection with the system bus. The cable was connected to system bus slot directly or with the interfacing card. The card was attached to the bus slot of the system. The hard disk drives were directly attached to the industry standard architecture system bus. ISA (Industry standard architecture) bus's slow speed was an issue that needed to be resolved along with improvement in the performance and system of the hard drive. Therefore the controller cards interface cards also called as ?interface cards? were developed to get high speed PCI bus and VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association ) local bus. The ATA/IDE interface is directly connected to the PC bus in the modern personal computer systems.

Manufacturers of chipset afterwards began to integrate controllers of IDE into the chipsets. Therefore the hard disk drives were directly attached to the motherboard rather than being connected to the controller card. With the help of this change the interface's integration was complete. Interface of ATA/IDE is straight forward and simple in its basic fundamental operations and it also depicts its origins as expansion of ISA (Industry standard architecture) system bus. Width of the connection between hard drive and the system is 16 bits. So in this way data of 2 bytes is transferred at a time between hard drive and the system.

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