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What is EIDE or Fast ATA?

April 26, 2017ATA EIDE fast

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What is EIDE or Fast ATA?

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Both are marketing programs used to promote various ATA-2 features, mostly the faster data transfer rates defined by ATA-2. WD defines EIDE as: • Support for drives larger than 528MB. • Support for two connectors to allow up to four drives. • Support for CD-ROM and tape peripherals. • Support for 11.1/16.6 Mbytes/second, I/O Channel Ready PIO data transfers. • Support for 13.3/16.6 Mbytes/second, DMA data transfers. Seagate defines Fast ATA as: • Support for PIO mode 3 (11.1 MB/sec) and DMA mode 1(13.3 MB/sec). • Support for Multi-sector [Read/Write Multiple] transfers. • Support for >528 MB. • Support for Identify Drive Extensions & Set Transfer Mode Extensions. • Backward compatibility with ATA-1. What does all of this mean to us? Support for the ATA-2 high speed PIO and DMA data transfer modes is both a hardware and software issue. Support for more than one hard disc controller (or ATA host adapter) requires the BIOS and/or the operating system to support more than one Task File or