Is the slot where the floppy disk drive plugs into the motherboard, a IDE port?

Question

I know that hard drive and CD/DVD drives go into the IDE slots, but there is a third slot and I think it is the third IDE port, but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

No, the IDE port is where your hard drive or an optional cd\dvd drive connects to. Motherboards typically have 2 IDE interfaces and two devices can plug into each one.

The floppy drive connector port will be near the IDE connector and a little narrower in size. That's probably the 3rd port you're seeing. A dead giveaway will be lettering on the motherboard that says 'floppy' or 'disk'. Be sure to align pin 1 with the stripe on the cable.

Answer 2

THe short answer is that the floppy interface is NOT anywhere close to an IDE inteface.

The details?
The floppy drive uses a specific protocol for floppy discs/drives. IDE is integrated drive electronics and refers to a much more sophisticated method of accessing hard drives and other devices which have processing hardware built into the interface. IDE interprets hard drive issues like number of heads, number of tracks (cylinders equates to the same track on multiple surfaces each read by a different "head").

Ide handles "interleaving" which is a process by which data can be written and read as quickly as possible. Floppy drives don't have interleaving issues because they rotate so slowly.

The original floppy interface was in essense an 8 bit parallel FIFO protocol (on IBM comptatibles) reading 1 word per clock cycle.

Todays interfaces (integrated onto the motherboard) are still hamstrung by the same backward compatibility issues