An improved system and method for deinterleaving a data unit containing chunks of two or more different data types. In an embodiment of the invention, both a device MPU and DMA hardware are used to deinterleave a data unit containing chunks of both compressed data and uncompressed data. The device MPU is used to transfer compressed data from an interleaved data buffer to a compressed data buffer, while the DMA hardware is used to transfer uncompressed data from the interleaved data buffer to a compressed data buffer. By using both the MPU and the DMA hardware, the overall efficiency of the data transfer process is improved.