Integrated Drive Electronics is a historic hardware interface standard for connecting hard drives and optical drives to a computer motherboard. It uses a wide, flat ribbon cable with 40 or 80 wires to transfer data in parallel. Because the controller logic is built directly into the drive itself, it simplified motherboard design before being entirely replaced by the faster serial ATA standard.
Heard on the job
I found an old IDE hard drive in the closet, but we don't have a motherboard with a parallel port to pull the data off it.
Also heard as
- ATA
- Parallel ATA
Do not mix it up with
- SATA: IDE uses a wide ribbon cable for parallel data transfer, while SATA uses a narrow cable for serial transfer.