Integrated Device Electronics is a historic standard for connecting hard drives and optical drives to computer motherboards. By moving the controller logic onto the drive itself, it simplified the host interface and reduced costs. The physical connection typically uses a wide 40-pin or 80-pin ribbon cable, passing parallel data between the host and the storage medium.
Dig through the parts bin and see if we still have an IDE ribbon cable so I can pull the data off this ancient hard drive.
Though technically referring to the integrated controller, technicians universally use IDE to mean the parallel ATA ribbon cable and connector.
Related terms
Disk drive
A mechanical storage device that reads and writes data to rotating magnetic or optical platters.
CD drive
An optical disc drive designed to read or write data on compact discs using a laser diode.
Motherboard
The main printed circuit board in a computer or complex electronic system routes power and data between major components.