Hard Disk Drives

[Conrad]

Hi,
Can anyone enlighten me...what is the difference between EIDE, UDMA and UIDE? I've fallen a 'bit behind' with HDD knowledge, which type is the best to go for of the three mentioned??????:confused: :confused: :confused:
Any advice will be gratefully received;)

[Bovon]

http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/E/EIDE.html
(main page)
http://webopedia.internet.com/

EIDE

Short for Enhanced IDE, a newer version of the IDE mass storage device interface standard developed by Western Digital Corporation. 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.

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.

http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/U/Ultra_DMA.html

Ultra DMA Last modified: May 19, 1998

A protocol developed by Quantum Corporation and Intel that supports burst mode data transfer rates of 33.3 MBps. This is twice as fast as the previous disk drive standard for PCs, and is necessary to take advantage of new, faster Ultra ATA disk drives.

The official name for the protocol is Ultra DMA/33. It's also called UDMA, UDMA/33 and DMA mode 33.

Hmmm, when I used UIDE as a search word, I got ATA data back.
http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/A/ATA.html

ATA Last modified: January 4, 2002

Short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:

ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).
ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.
Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.
ATA/66: A new version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that will double ATA's throughput to 66 MBps.