IDE storage devices, cables, and drivers; also known as PATA or Parallel ATA.
Integrated Drive Electronics is a standard electronic interface used between a computer motherboard's data paths or bus and the computer's disk storage devices. A major difference compared to other storage interfaces of the time, such as ST-506 or ESDI, was moving the drive controller from the host adapter onto the drive itself. This relieved the host system of the responsibility of stepping the read/write arm, signal modulation, and so on, allowing many such tasks to be handled internally by the drive.
IDE is also sometimes referred to as Parallel ATA, PATA or by its original standardized name AT Attachment.
IDE became a standard in the second half of the 1980s and remained reasonably common throughout the first decade of the 2000s. It has since been replaced in most applications by SATA (Serial ATA), which was introduced in 2003.
