| Question | Answer |
| A drive that can hold either
a 5 inch or 3 inch floppy disk. Also called floppy
drive. | floppy disk drive (FDD) |
| The top or bottom surface of one platter on a
hard drive. Each platter has two heads. | head |
| A number assigned to a
logical device (such as a tray in a CD changer) that
is part of a physical SCSI device, which is assigned
a SCSI ID. | Logical Unit Number (LUN) |
| A hard drive whose disk controller
is integrated into the drive, eliminating the need
for a controller cable and thus increasing speed, as
well as reducing price. See also EIDE. | IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics or Integrated Device
Electronics) |
| An IDE cable that is narrower and
has fewer pins than the parallel IDE 80-conductor
cable. | serial ATA cable |
| The circuit board that controls a SCSI
bus supporting as many as seven or fifteen separate
devices. The host adapter controls communication
between the SCSI bus and the PC. | host adapter |
| The resistor added at the end of
a SCSI chain to dampen the voltage at the end of
the chain. | terminating resistor |
| A fast
interface between a host adapter and the CPU that
can daisy chain as many as 7 or 15 devices on a
single bus. | SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) |
| A feature of system BIOS and hard
drives that automatically identifies and configures
a new drive in BIOS setup. | autodetection |
| The first sector of a floppy disk or hard
drive volume; it contains information about the
disk or volume. On a hard drive, if the boot record
is in the active partition, then it can be used to
boot the OS. Also called boot sector. | boot record |
| The main secondary storage device of a
PC. Two technologies are currently used by hard
drives: magnetic and solid state. Also called a hard
disk drive (HDD). | hard drive |
| One or more sectors that constitute the
smallest unit of space on a disk for storing data
(also referred to as a file allocation unit). Files are
written to a disk as groups of whole clusters. | cluster |
| A SCSI standard that allows for more than 15 devices on a single SCSI chain, uses smaller, longer, round cables, and uses smaller hard drive form factors that can support larger capacities than earlier versions of SCSI. | serial attached SCSI (SAS) |
| A male 9-pin or 25-pin port on a computer system used by slower I/O devices such as a mouse or modem. Data travels serially, one bit at a time, through the port. | serial port |
| An older IDE cabling method that uses a 40-pin flat or round data cable or an 80- conductor cable and a 40-pin IDE connector. | parallel ATA (PATA) |
