The databus is an electrical path that connects the CPU,memory,and the other hardware devices
on the motherboard.Actually the bus is a group of parallel wires.Each wire can transfer one
bit at the time,an eight wire bus can move 8 bits at the time etc
Being new to computers,I would like to know if the IDE cables are this
electrical path and if not,what do the IDE cables transfer ?
The IDE interface is located on a different bus controlled by the Southbridge chipset. The CPU, RAM and graphics card are controlled via the Northbridge
This isn’t the most technical definition, but a bus is a data path with a start and end point which devices plug into. In a loose sense, IDE/ATA might seem like a bus, but a bus typically connotates more than one device plugging into and using the data path at the same time. That’s why SCSI can be defined as a bus while IDE/ATA cannot. ATA devices only allow for one device at a time to access the IDE channel, and why you only see a maximum of two devices per channel being supported.