I read the following in a computer book : 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 ? Jupiter6
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
well! no, on the M/B is a northbridge & a southbridge but i can't remember which does what (somebody will know) but i do know that the IDE cables are NOT a data bus the IDE cables transfer data to or from a device (usually hdd or CD)
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.
