Glossary Appendix A
Seagate Travan 40 Product Manual Page 127
MASTER Device address 0 on an IDE bus
Mbyte or
MEGABYTE A megabyte is one million (1,000,000) bytes.
MTBF Mean Time Between Failures
MTTR Mean Time to Repair
MULTI-WORD
DMA An ATA protocol for DMA that transfers more than one word (2-bytes)
during each timing cycle.
NIBBLE A group of four binary bits operated on as a unit.
NOISE A disturbance of the signal caused by the read channel, write channel,
head/tape interaction, or conducted or radiated sources.
OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer
OPERATING
SYSTEM The software in the computer that controls the computer environment.
PACKET A group of contiguous data bytes that describe input parameters for an
ATAPI command.
PARAMETER An item of information used for configuration or control.
PCB Printed Circuit Board
PCISET A ‘CHIPSET’ that provides interfaces to/from a PCI bus
PERIPHERAL A device with which the computer communicates. The computer
generally controls these devices indirectly through the means of a
controller (another piece of hardware) and a program or other
programs.
QIC Quarter Inch Cartridge Drive Standards, Incorporated
PHANTOM
SLAVE When the only one device on an IDE bus is a ‘master’ (e.g., there is no
‘slave’), the ‘master’ device is responsible for providing certain
responses from the Host to the missing ‘slave’ device. The ATA-3 and
ATA-4 documents specify different behaviors for this configuration.
This device uses the ATA-3 definition.
PIO Programmed I/O. This is a method of performing device I/O, where the
Host processor must explicitly read or write two bytes at a time via the
taskfile Data register. This is very processor-intensive. See PIO MODE
PIO MODE There are five data rates possible with this technique: 0 through 4
POSTAMBLE Guard information recorded after the data block.
QIC Quarter Inch Cartridge Drive Standards, Inc.
QIC157 A QIC specification for ATAPI and SCSI streaming tape devices