Eurotech Appliances COM-1460 user manual Glossary, Atapi, Bios

Glossary

A

ATA

Advanced Technology Attachment, is a disk drive implementation integrating the controller on the disk drive. There are several versions of ATA:

ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.

ATA-2:Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).

ATA-3:Minor revision to ATA-2.

Ultra-ATA:Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.

ATA/66: A new version of ATA, that will double ATA's throughput to 66 MBps

ATAPI

Short for AT Attachment Packet Interface, an extension to EIDE that enables the interface to support CD- ROM players

B

BIOS

Basic I/O system. A set of routines that works closely with the hardware to support the transfer of information between elements of the system, such as memory, disks, and the monitor. Although critical to performance, the BIOS is usually invisible to the end user; however, programmers can access it.