Integrated Drive Electronics is a standard electronic interface that is used as a data path for a computer's disc storage devices. IDE drives are cheaper and less expensive to implement when compared with SCSI drives. And whereas SCSI drives have traditionally been viewed as more robust and quicker than the IDE counterparts, the gap between them is shrinking due to the general reliability of hard drives in general. Apple suspended the use of the SCSI interface in their computers several years ago, and now provides the cheaper EIDE bus, which is an enhanced version of IDE.
(See SCSI)