...s.com for more information) Serial ATA, also known as SATA or S-ATA, is a bus used to communicate between the CPU and internal storage devices such ... ... drives. It is designed to eventually replace the ATA (also known as IDE) bus. Traditional ATA is beginning to be referred to as Parrellel ATA, P-AT... ...o 300 MB/s, with 600 MB/s being released sometime around 2007. The faster bus isn't expected to affect performance in the short term, since hard dri... ...eing used. DMA DMA (Direct Memory Access) is a function of the memory bus in the computer that lets connected devices like hard disks transfer d... ...O works. There are two distinct types of direct memory access, DMA and bus mastering DMA. The plain DMA relies on the DMA controller on the mothe... ...in DMA relies on the DMA controller on the motherboard to grab the system bus and transfer the data. In bus mastering DMA all this is done by the lo... ... mastering DMA all this is done by the logic on the interface card itself. Bus mastering allows the hard disk and memory to work without relying on t... ...ystem, or needing any support from the CPU. USB USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a hardware bus using a serial protocol used by many different hard... ..., Intel, NEC and Microsoft. It allows many devices to be connected to the bus at the same time, the theoretical maxmium is 127 devices. The maximum ...