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I think I am confusing the difference between some of the of busses, such as IDE, SATA, USB, and PCI. What is the relationship between all four, how are they connected to each other? From what I read it seems like PCI connects them together as well as to the CPU, but it's not clear. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am cross referencing this post with another I made about the Linux commands to browse them. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/27414/ide-and-pci-bus-commands

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rubixibuc
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2 Answers2

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The interrelationship of the different busses is roughly as follows:

                                               / SATA
CPU => Northbridge => PCI Bus => Southbridge =>  IDE
                                               \ USB

Where the Northbridge and Southbridge are names given to the two main controller chips inside a PC.

IDE and SATA both perform the same job but through different physical media - they are for attaching hard drives etc.

IDE is "Integrated Device Electronics" - also known as "ATA" or "ATAPI" (ATA Peripheral Interface).

SATA is "Serial ATA" - the same ATA protocol but serial instead of parallel.

USB is a serial communications bus which can communicate with any number of devices, not just hard drives and other storage devices. It speaks a completely different protocol to the ATA family.

PCI (and the derivatives PCIe, etc) are much closer to the CPU and generally provides much more direct access to the CPU.

Edit:

You can see how everything is connected together in Windows through the Device Manager set to View Devices by Connection:

enter image description here

Majenko
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  • According to you picture I'm assuming They all connect through the pci bus? – rubixibuc Dec 23 '11 at 03:36
  • Yes, most things in a computer connect to the PCI bus. You can see this for yourself in Windows by entering the Device Manager and selecting to View by Connection (see the edit to my answer). – Majenko Dec 23 '11 at 11:51
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This smells like a homework assignment. In any case, it should be easy to look up some introduction to each of these busses and then compare them. However, briefly:

  • IDE is a parallel bus used primarily inside computers to communicate with disk drives. It is carried on ribbon cables 2-3 inches wide.

  • SATA is the replacement for IDE. It is high speed serial, so uses a lot fewer wires.

  • PCI is the bus you physically plug I/O cards into in a PC. These are the cards with the tall thin metal faces that provide connections out the back via the "I/O slots". For example, you can get add on ethernet "cards" if you want your PC to have more than the one network connetion the comes on the motherboard.

  • USB is for external devices. Surely you've heard of this unless you've been living under a rock for the last 20 years.

As for compare and contrast, this is your homework assignment, not mine.

Olin Lathrop
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  • It's not hw, I just wanted to know more about it. What I was trying to ask was does USB, SATA, and IDE all connect through the PCI bus – rubixibuc Dec 23 '11 at 03:15