DMA is the acronym for Direct Memory Access and indicates some bus architectures implemented in computers that allow the direct transfer of data from connected devices (hard disks, USB drives, peripherals, etc..) to RAM memory without the intervention of the processor in byte transfer management (by sending an interrupt). This technique offers an overall improvement of computing operationg and a lower CPU load.

The usage of the DMA technique is particularly useful when peripherals that communicate among them have different data transfer speeds.