MIDIbox

An acronym for Enhanced IDE, a newer version of the IDE mass storage device interface standard developed by Western Digital Corporation. The original concept was the offspring of ESDI technology. It supports data rates of between 4 and 16.6 MBps, about three to four times faster than the old IDE standard. In addition, it can support mass storage devices of up to 8.4 gigabytes, whereas the old standard was limited to 528 MB. Because of its lower cost, enhanced EIDE has replaced SCSI in many areas. (While data transfer rates approach SCSI, the offloaded CPU duties and number of devices is not up to the capability of SCSI.) EIDE is sometimes referred to as Fast ATA or Fast IDE, which is essentially the same standard, developed and promoted by Seagate Technologies. It is also sometimes called ATA-2. There are four EIDE modes defined. The most common is Mode 4, which supports transfer rates of 16.6 MBps. There is also a new mode, called ATA-3 or Ultra ATA, that supports transfer rates of 33 MBps.