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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.