Question | Answer |
80-conductor IDE cable | An IDE cable that has 40 pins but uses 80 wires, 40 of which are ground wires designed to reduce crosstalk on the cable. |
active partition | The one bootable partition. |
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) | A nonprofit organization dedicated to creating trade and communications standards. |
ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface) | An interface standard, part of the IDE/ATA standards, that allows tape drives, CD-ROM drives, and other drives to be treated like an IDE hard drive by the system. |
autodetection | A feature of system BIOS and hard drives that automatically identifies and configures a new drive in CMOS setup. |
basic disk | A single hard drive that works independently of other hard drives. |
block mode | A method of data transfer between hard drive and memory that allows multiple data transfers on a single software interrupt. |
boot record | The first sector of a floppy disk or logical drive in a partition; it contains information about the disk or logical drive. On a hard drive, if the boot record is in the active partition, then it is used to boot the OS. Also called boot sector. |
boot sector | Another term for a boot record. |
cluster | 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. |
DMA (direct memory access) transfer mode | A transfer mode used by devices, including the hard drive, to transfer data to memory without involving the CPU. |
drive image | The duplication of everything written to a hard drive. |
EIDE (Enhanced IDE) | A standard for managing the interface between secondary storage devices and a computer system. |
extended partition | An extended partition can be divided into one or more logical drives. Each logical drive is assigned a drive letter (such as drive G:) and is formatted using its own file system. |
external SATA (eSATA) | standard that specifies full SATA cabling for external disks. |
FAT12 | The 12-bit wide, one-column file allocation table for a floppy disk, containing information about how each cluster or file allocation unit on the disk is currently used. |
file allocation unit | Another term for a cluster. |
fault tolerance | A computer’s ability to respond to a fault or catastrophe, such as a hardware failure or power outage, so that data is not lost. |
file allocation table (FAT) | A table on a hard drive or floppy disk that tracks how space on a disk is used to store files. |
file allocation unit | A cluster in the file allocation table (FAT). |
file system | The overall structure an OS uses to name, store, and organize files on a drive. In a file system, a cluster is the smallest unit of space on a disk for storing a file and is made up of one or more sectors. |
floppy disk drive (FDD) | a drive that can hold either a 5 ¼ inch or 3 ½ inch floppy disk. |
Formatting | The process, you specify the size of the partition and what file system it will use. |
hard disk drive (HDD) | Most often called a hard drive, comes in two sizes for personal computers |
head | The top or bottom surface of one platter on a hard drive. Each platter has two heads. |
high-level formatting | Formatting performed by means of the DOS or Windows Format program (for example, FORMAT C:/S creates the boot record, FAT, and root directory on drive C and makes the drive bootable). Also called OS formatting. |
host adapter | 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. |
IDE (Integrated Device Electronics) | 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. |
hot-plugging | See hot-swappable. |
hot-swapping | Having the ability to connect and disconnect a drive while the system is running. |
hybrid hard drives | A drive that uses both solid state and magnetic technologies. |
Integrated Device Electronics | A loose term for the EIDE (enhanced IDE) standard. |
Logical Unit Number (LUN) | 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. |
low-level formatting | A process (usually performed at the factory) that electronically creates the hard drive tracks and sectors and tests for bad spots on the disk surface. |
magnetic hard drive | A drive with one, two, or more platters, or disks that stack together and spin in unison inside a sealed metal housing that contains firmware to control reading and writing data to the drive and to communicate with the motherboard. |
mirrored volume | See RAID 1. Windows calls RAID 1 a mirrored volume. |
New Technology file system (NTFS) | A file system designed to provide greater security and to support more storage capacity than the FAT32 file system. |
operating system formatting | another term for high-level formatting. |
parallel ATA | An older IDE cabling method that uses a 40-pin flat data cable or an 80-conductor cable and a 40-pin IDE connector. See also serial ATA. |
PIO (Programmed Input/Output) transfer mode | A transfer mode that uses the CPU to transfer data from the hard drive to memory. PIO mode is slower than DMA mode. |
RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) | Technology uses an array of hard drives used to provide fault tolerance and/or improvement in performance. |
RAID 0 | Uses space from two or more physical disks to increase the disk space available for a single volume. RAID 0 writes to the physical disks evenly across all disks so that no one disk receives all the activity, and therefore improves performance. |
RAID 1 | Is a type of drive imaging. It duplicates data on one drive to another drive and is used for fault tolerance. |
RAID 5 | stripes data across three or more drives and uses parity checking, so that if one drive fails, the other drives can re-create the data stored on the failed drive. |
RAID-5 volumes | See RAID 5. |
read/write head | A sealed, magnetic coil device that moves across the surface of a disk either reading data from or writing data to the disk. |
ReadyDrive | Windows Vista technology that supports a hybrid drive. |
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) | 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 ID | A number from 0 to 15 assigned to each SCSI device attached to the daisy chain. |
SCSI host adapter card | commonly called the host adapter. The host adapter is inserted into an expansion slot on the motherboard and is responsible for managing all devices on the SCSI bus. A host adapter can support both internal and external SCSI devices, using one connector o |
serial ATA (SATA) | An ATAPI cabling method that uses a narrower and more reliable cable than the 80-conductor cable. See also parallel ATA. |
serial ATA cable | An IDE cable that is narrower and has fewer pins than the parallel IDE 80-conductor cable. |
serial attached SCSI (SAS) | The latest SCSI standard, serial SCSI, also called serial attached SCSI (SAS), 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 |
simple volume | Another name for the primary volume. |
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) | A self-monitoring technology whereby the BIOS monitors the health of the hard drive and warns of an impending failure. |
solid state device (SSD) | A drive with no moving parts. Also called a solid state drive. |
solid state drive (SSD) | A drive with no moving parts. Also called a solid state device. |
Spanning | When two hard drives are configured as a single volume. |
terminating resistor | The resistor added at the end of a SCSI chain to dampen the voltage at the end of the chain. |
Volume | The primary partition. The volume is assigned a drive letter (such as drive C |