Or E-IDE. Acronym for Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics. An extension of the IDE standard, EIDE is a hardware interface standard for disk drive designs that house control circuits in the drives themselves. It allows for standardized interfaces to the system bus while providing for advanced features, such as burst data transfer and direct data access. EIDE accommodates drives as large as 8.4 gigabytes (IDE supports up to 528 megabytes). It supports the ATA-2 interface, which permits transfer rates up to 13.3 megabytes per second (IDE permits up to 3.3 megabytes per second), and the ATAPI interface, which connects drives for CD-ROMs, optical discs and tapes, and multiple channels. Most PCs have EIDE drives, which are cheaper than SCSI drives and provide much of the same functionality. See also IDE, SCSI.