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Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) is a generic term that might be normally applied to any drive with an integrated (built-in) disk controller.
The first drives with an integrated controller were HardCards.
In the IDE architecture, the disk controller is integrated into the drive. This combination of drive/controller assembly usually plugs into an interface on the motherboard or an interface card plugged into an empty bus slot in some older configurations. The ATA Specification is simply a set of rules or guidelines that an IDE drive should conform to.
The current revision of the ATA specification is ATA-5.
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