Hard Drive Interfaces

[Corbanpepsi]

I'm quite a hardware junkie, but something that has perplexed me for a long time is hard drive interfaces. What the crunk is the difference between ATAPI, UDMA/66, IDE, EIDE, and everything else there is out there. How can I know which will work with my mobo, etc?

[wyvrn]

I am not going to give you a really technical answer. But maybe I can shed some light. ATA and UDMA are basically the same thing, the higher the number means a faster rate of transfer. For example, an ATA66 drive can theoretically transfer twice as much data as the ATA/UDMA 33 spec in any given time period. IDE is a standard hard drive term for the type of hard drive you have. EIDE is an enhanced IDE (shoot me down if I am wrong) and is the current standard. IDE and EIDE are used interchangable much of the time.

Here is ATAPI explained by www.whatis.com (http://www.whatis.com) :

AT Attachment Packet Interface

ATAPI is an interface between your computer and attached CD-ROM drives and tape backup drives. Most of today's PC computers use the standard Integrated Drive Electronics (Integrated Drive Electronics) interface to address hard disk drives. ATAPI provides the additional commands needed for controlling a CD-ROM player or tape backup so that your computer can use the IDE interface and controllers to control these relatively newer device types.

Most newer mobos will support ATA66 and all new hard drives will meet the spec. Pentium II and K6 chipsets and older may not.