Tech Chapter 6

Most often, when installing an IDE drive, the startup BIOS autodetects the drive and selects the fastest mode that the drive and the BIOS support.

After installation, you can go into BIOS setup and see which DMA mode is being used.

The ATA standards are developed by Technical Committee T13 (www.t13.org) and published by ANSI (American National Standards Institute, www.ansi.org). As these standards developed, different drive manufacturers called them different names, which can be confusing.

Many memory standards exist because manufacturers and consortiums are always trying to come up with faster and more reliable technologies. The many ATA standards exist for the same reasons.

To reduce the amount of electrical "noise," or interference, on a SCSI cable, each end of the SCSI chain has a terminating resistor.

The terminating resistor can be a hardware device plugged into the last device on each end of the chain, or the device can have firmware-controlled termination resistance, which makes installation simpler.

SATA interfaces are much faster than PATA interfaces and are used by all types of drives, including hard drives, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and tape drives.

SATA supports hot-swapping, also called hot-plugging. With hot-swapping, you can connect and disconnect a drive while the system is running.

SCSI standards can be used by many internal and external devices, including hard drives, optical drives, printers, and scanners.

SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy") stands for Small Computer System Interface and is a standard for communication between a subsystem of peripheral devices and the system bus. The SCSI bus can support up to 7 or 15 devices. SCSI devices tend to be faster, more expensive, and more difficult to install than similar ATA devices.

Data is organized on a magnetic hard drive in concentric circles, called tracks.

Each track is divided into segments called sectors (also called records). Older hard drives used sectors that contained 512 bytes. Most current hard drives use 4096-byte sectors.

Many SSD drives report to the BIOS the number of write operations, which is the best measurement of when the drive might fail.

If S.M.A.R.T. suspects a drive failure is about to happen, it displays a warning message. S.M.A.R.T. can be enabled and disabled in BIOS setup.

Replace the cover, turn on the computer, and enter BIOS setup to verify the drive is recognized with no errors.

If you are adding (not replacing) a floppy drive, you must inform BIOS setup by accessing setup and changing the drive type. Boot to the Windows desktop and test the drive by formatting a disk or copying data to a disk.

Carefully read all the documentation for the drive and controller card, as well as the part of your motherboard documentation.

If you have any questions, keep researching until you locate the answer. Be sure to protect against ESD by wearing a ground bracelet during the installation. You need to also avoid working on carpet in the winter when there's a lot of static electricity.

A hard disk drive (HDD), most often called a hard drive, comes in two sizes for personal computers: the 2.5" size is used for laptop computers and the 3.5" size is used for desktops.

In addition, a smaller 1.8" size hard drive (about the size of a credit card) is used in some low-end laptops and other equipment such as MP3 players.

The two types of hardware technologies used inside the drive are solid state and magnetic.

In addition, some drives use a combination of both technologies.

The size of each sector and the total number of sectors on the drive determine the drive capacity.

Today's drive capacities are usually measured in GB (gigabytes) or TB (terabytes, each of which is 1024 gigabytes). Magnetic drives are generally much larger in capacity than SSD drives.

When installing a floppy drive, install the drive in a bay as you would a hard drive and connect the data cable and power cord.

When connecting the data cable, align the edge color of the ribbon cable with pin 1 on the motherboard connector.

Look at the drive bay that you will use for the drive. The bay can be stationary or removable. Follow these steps to install the drive:

1. Decide if it's best to connect the ribbon cable to the drive before or after you install the drive in the bay. Then install the drive in the bay and connect the cable in whichever order works best for your situation.

Some added precautions for working with a hard drive are as follows:

1. Handle the drive carefully. 2. Do not touch any exposed circuitry or chips. 3. Prevent other people from touching exposed microchips on the drive.

For one motherboard that has six SATA connectors that support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10, here are the general directions to install the RAID array using three matching hard drives in a RAID 5 array:

1. Install the three SATA drives in the computer case and connect each drive to a SATA connector on the motherboard. To help keep the drives cool, the drives are installed with an empty bay between each drive.

Several types of RAID exist; the four most commonly used are RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10.

1. Spanning, sometimes called JBOD (just a bunch of disks), uses two hard drives to hold a single Windows volume, such as drive E:. Data is written to the first drive, and, when it is full, the data continues to be written to the second.

When purchasing a hard drive, consider:

1. The capacity of the drive. Hard drives for desktop systems are in the range of 60 GB for SSD drives to more than 2 TB for magnetic drives. The more gigabytes or terabytes, the higher the price. Magnetic drives have larger capacity for the money than solid state drives.

A technology that configures two or more hard drives to work together as an array of drives is called RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks). Two reasons you might consider using RAID are:

1. To improve fault tolerance, which is 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. 2. To improve performance by writing data to two or more hard drives so that a single drive is not excessively used.

2. The spindle speed. Magnetic hard drives for desktop systems run at 5400, 7200, 10,000, or 15,000 RPM (revolutions per minute). The most common is 7200 RPM. The higher the RPMs, the faster the drive.

3. The interface standard. Use the standards your motherboard supports. For SATA, most likely that will be SATA II or SATA III. For a PATA IDE drive, most likely that will be Ultra ATA-100/133. For external drives, common standards are eSATA, FireWire 800 or 400, and SuperSpeed or Hi-Speed USB.

2. Connect the data cable to the IDE connector on the motherboard. Make certain pin 1 and the edge color on the cable align correctly at both ends of the cable. Normally, pin 1 is closest to the power connection on the drive.

3. You can now install a power connection to each drive. PATA drives use the Molex 5-pin power connector. The cord only goes into the connection one way.

3. Reboot the system and a message is displayed on-screen: Press Ctrl and I to enter the utility. Notice in the information area that the three drives are recognized and their current status is Non-RAID Disk.

4. Select option 1 to "Create RAID Volume." On the next screen, enter a volume name.

4. When you first take the drive out of the static-protective package, touch the package containing the drive to a screw holding an expansion card or cover, or to a metal part of the computer case, for at least two seconds. This drains the static electricity from the package and from your body.

5. If you must set down the drive outside the static-protective package, place it component-side-up on a flat surface. 6. Do not place the drive on the computer case cover or on a metal table. If you're assembling a new system, it's best to install devices before you install the motherboard so that you will not accidentally bump sensitive motherboard components with the drives.

5. Under RAID Level, select RAID5 (Parity). Because we are using RAID 5, which requires three hard drives, the option to select the disks for the array is not available. All three disks will be used in the array.

6. Select the value for the Strip Size. (This is the amount of space devoted to one strip across the striped array. Choices are 32 KB, 64 KB, or 128 KB.)

6. Connect a 15-pin SATA power connector or 5-pin Molex power connector from the power supply to the drive.

7. Check all your connections and power up the system. 8. To verify the drive was recognized correctly, enter BIOS setup and look for the drive. A BIOS setup screen on one system that has two SATA connectors and one PATA connector.

7. Enter the size of the volume. You don't have to use all the available space. The space you don't use can later be configured as another array.

8. Select Create Volume to complete the RAID configuration. A message appears warning you that if you proceed, all data on all three hard drives will be lost. Type Y to continue. The array is created and the system reboots.

PATA or IDE drives use ribbon cables than can accommodate one or two drives.

A motherboard can have one or two IDE connectors for up to four PATA devices in the system using two data cables. All PATA standards since ATA-2 support this configuration of four IDE devices in a system, which is called the Enhanced IDE (EIDE) standard.

Following the PATA or EIDE standard, a motherboard can support up to four EIDE devices using either 80-conductor or 40-conductor cables.

A motherboard can have one or two IDE headers. Each header or connector accommodates one IDE channel, and each channel can accommodate one or two IDE devices. One channel is called the primary channel, while the other channel is called the secondary channel.

The maximum recommended length of both cables is 18", although it is possible to purchase 24" cables.

A ribbon cable usually comes bundled with a motherboard that has an IDE header. Use a smaller round PATA cable so as not to hinder airflow in a system.

A SCSI bus can support more than one type of connector, and you can use connector adapters to plug a cable with one type of connector into a port using another type of connector. The three major versions of SCSI are SCSI-1, SCSI-2, and SCSI-3, commonly known as Regular SCSI, Fast SCSI, and Ultra SCSI.

A variation of SCSI is serial SCSI, also called serial attached SCSI (SAS), which 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. SAS can be compatible with SATA drives in the same system and claims to be more reliable and better performing than SATA.

4. Before you replace the case cover, plug in the monitor and turn on the computer.

After you confirm that your drive is recognized, the size of the drive is detected correctly, and supported features are set to be automatically detected, power down the system and replace the case cover. Then the next thing to do is to use an operating system to prepare the drive for first use.

All the devices and the host adapter form a single Daisy chain.

All devices go through the host adapter to communicate with the CPU or directly with each other without involving the CPU. Each device on the bus is assigned a number from 0 to 15 called the SCSI ID, by means of DIP switches, dials on the device, or software settings.

There are five PIO modes used by hard drives, from the slowest (PIO mode 0) to the fastest (PIO mode 4), and seven DMA modes from the slowest (DMA mode 0) to the fastest (DMA mode 6).

All motherboards that use IDE today support Ultra DMA, which means that data is transferred twice for each clock beat, at the beginning and again at the end.

A motherboard that has SATA connectors might have an IDE header, too.

An IDE header can be used for an optical drive or some other EIDE drive, including a hard drive. But SATA drives are faster than PATA drives, so it's best to use the IDE header for other types of drives than the hard drive.

When installing a hard drive on the same channel with an ATAPI drive such as a CD drive, always make the hard drive the master and make the ATAPI drive the slave.

An even better solution is to install the hard drive on the primary channel and the CD drive and any other drive on the secondary channel. The motherboard might also be color-coded so that the primary channel connector is blue and the secondary channel connector is black.

A tape drive can be external or internal.

An external tape drive costs more but can be used by more than one computer. An internal tape drive can interface with a computer using a SCSI, PATA, or SATA connection. An external tape drive can connect to a computer using a USB, FireWire, SCSI, SAS, or eSATA port.

SATA connections are much easier to configure and use than PATA connections. A SATA drive connects to one internal SATA connector on the motherboard by way of a 7-pin SATA data cable and uses a 15-pin SATA power connector.

An internal SATA data cable can be up to 1 meter in length, and is much narrower compared to the 40-pin PATA ribbon cable. A motherboard might have two or more SATA connectors; use the connectors in the order recommended in the motherboard user guide.

A floppy drive might be an external or internal device.

An internal device consists of the floppy drive, it's 34-pin ribbon cable, power cable, and connections. The Berg power connector has a small plastic latch that snaps in place when you connect it to the drive.

2. Decide which bay will hold the drive. Examine bays and the length of the data cables and power cords.

Bays designed for hard drives do not have access to the outside of the case. Some bays are stationary, meaning the drive is installed inside the bay because it stays in the case. Other bays are removable; you remove the bay and install the drive in the bay, and then return the bay to the case.

The PATA drive has a bank of jumpers. These jumpers are used to determine master or slave settings on the IDE channel.

Because a serial data cable accommodates only a single drive, there is no need for jumpers on the drive for master or slave settings. However, a SATA drive might have jumpers used to set features such as the ability to power up from standby mode.

Tape drives are an inexpensive way of backing up an entire hard drive or portions of it.

Because tape drives are less expensive for backups than external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, or USB flash drives, they are still used for backups even though other methods are more convenient.

Because flash memory is expensive, solid state drives are much more expensive than magnetic hard drives,

But they are faster, more reliable, last longer, and use less power than magnetic drives.

Some SATA drives have two power connectors.

Choose between the SATA power connector (which is the preferred connector) or the legacy 5-pin Molex connector, but never install two power cords to the drive at the same time because this could damage the drive.

A hard drive uses one of two methods to transfer data between the hard drive and memory: DMA (direct memory access) transfer mode or PIO (Programmed Input/Output) transfer mode.

DMA transfers data directly from the drive to memory without involving the CPU. PIO mode involves the CPU and is slower and older than DMA mode.

4. 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 by using the parity information.

Data is not duplicated, and, therefore, RAID 5 makes better use of volume capacity. RAID 5 drives increase performance and provide fault tolerance. Windows calls these drives RAID-5 volumes.

The memory in an SSD is called NAND flash memory.

EEPROM chips are limited as to the number of times transistors can be reprogrammed.

3. RAID 1 is a type of mirroring that duplicates data on one drive to another drive and is used for fault tolerance.

Each drive has its own volume, and the two volumes are called mirrors. If one drive fails, the other continues to operate and data is not lost. Windows calls RAID 1 a mirrored volume.

The SCSI ID identifies the physical device, which can have several logical devices embedded in it. For example, a CD-ROM jukebox might have seven trays.

Each tray is considered a logical device and is assigned a Logical Unit Number (LUN) to identify it. The ID and LUN are written as two numbers separated by a colon. (5:4)

SATA uses a serial data path rather than the traditional parallel data path.

Essentially, the difference between the two is that data is placed on a serial cable one bit following the next, but with parallel cabling, all data in a byte is placed on the cable at one time. Transfer rates for PATA are expressed in bytes (MB/sec) and transfer rates for SATA are expressed in bits (GB/sec).

The two general categories of all SCSI standards used on PCs have to do with the width in bits of the SCSI data bus, either 8 bits (narrow SCSI) or 16 bits (wide SCSI). In almost every case, if the SCSI standard is 16 bits, the word " wide " is in the name for the standard.

For 8-bit SCSI standards, the word "narrow" is usually not mentioned in names for the standard. Narrow SCSI uses a cable with a 50-pin SCSI connector (also called an A cable), and wide SCSI uses a cable with a 68-pin SCSI connector (also called a P cable). Narrow SCSI can also use a 25-pin SCSI connector that looks like a parallel port connector.

You are now ready to install Windows. Windows 7/Vista automatically "sees" the RAID array as a single 500 GB hard drive because Windows 7/Vista has built-in hardware RAID drivers.

For Windows XP, when you begin the XP installation, you must press F6 at the beginning of the installation to install RAID drivers. After Windows is installed on the drive, Windows will call it drive C:.

Under parallel ATA, two types of ribbon cables are used. The older cable has 40 pins and 40 wires. The 80-conductor IDE cable has 40 pins and 80 wires. Forty wires are used for communication and data, and an additional 40 ground wires reduce crosstalk on the cable.

For maximum performance, an 80-conductor IDE cable is required by ATA/66 and above. The 80-conductor cable is color-coded with the blue connector always connected to the motherboard. You can use an 80-conductor cable in place of a 40-conductor cable in a system.

Therefore, the lifespan of an SSD drive is based on the number of write operations to the drive. (The number of read operations does not affect the lifespan.)

For normal desktop or laptop computers, an SSD is rated to last for over 200 years. For high-use servers, the lifespan of an SSD is considerably shorter.

Today's floppy drive cables have a connector at each end and accommodate a single drive, but older cables have an extra connector or two in the middle of the cable for a second floppy drive.

For these systems, you can install two floppy drives on the same cable, and the drives will be identified by BIOS as drive A: and drive B:.

External hard drives can connect to a computer by way of external SATA (eSATA), SCSI, FireWire, USB, or a variation of SCSI called Fibre Channel.

Interface standards define data speeds and transfer methods between the drive controller, the BIOS, the chipset on the motherboard, and the OS. The standards also define the type of cables and connectors used by the drive and the motherboard or expansion cards.

5. RAID 10, also called RAID 1+0 and pronounced "RAID one zero" (not "RAID ten"), is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0.

It takes at least four disks for RAID 10. Data is mirrored across pairs of disks. In addition, the two pairs of disks are striped. RAID 10 is the most expensive solution that provides the best redundancy and performance.

3. For a stationary bay, slide the drive in the bay, and secure one side of the drive with one or two short screws.

It's best to use two screws so the drive will not move in the bay. Some drive bays provide one or two tabs that you can pull out before you slide the drive in the bay and then push the tabs in to secure the drive. Another option is a sliding tab.

Often, diagrams of the jumpers settings are printed on the top of the hard drive housing. A black square represents an empty pin and a black rectangle represents a pair of pins with a jumper in place.

Know that your hard drive might not have the first configuration as an option, but it should have a way of indicating if the drive will be the master device. If a drive is the only drive on a channel, set it to single. For two drives on a controller, set one to master and the other to slave.

Tape drives accommodate one of two kinds of tapes: full-sized data cartridges and the smaller minicartridges.

Minicartridges are more popular because their drives can fit into a standard 3 inch drive bay of a PC case.

If two hard drives share the same PATA cable but use different standards, both drives will run at the speed of the slower drive unless the motherboard chipset controlling the IDE connections supports a feature called Independent Device Timing.

Most chipsets today support this feature, and with it, the two drives can run at different speeds as long as the motherboard supports those speeds.

The serial ATA or SATA (pronounced "say-ta") standard uses a serial data path, and a SATA data cable can accommodate only a single SATA drive.

New motherboards sold today use only SATA connections. A third internal interface standard is SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy").

2. Boot the system and enter BIOS setup.

On the Advanced setup screen, verify the three drives are recognized. Select the option to configure SATA and then select RAID from the menu.

Each IDE connector uses one 40-pin cable. The cable has two connectors on it: one connector in the middle of the cable and one at the far end. An EIDE device can be a hard drive, DVD drive, CD drive, tape drive, or another type of drive.

One device is configured to act as the master controlling the channel, and the other device on the channel is the slave. There are, therefore, four possible configurations: 1. Primary IDE channel, master device 2. Primary IDE channel, slave device 3. Secondary IDE channel, master device 4. Secondary IDE channel, slave device

The two most popular internal drive interfaces are Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA).

Parallel ATA or PATA (pronounced "pay-ta"), also called the IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) standard, is older and slower than SATA. PATA allows for one or two IDE connectors on a motherboard, each using a 40-pin data cable.

2. RAID 0 also uses 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. Windows calls RAID 0 a striped volume. To understand that term, think of data striped---or written across---several hard drives. RAID 0 is preferred to spanning.

The biggest disadvantage of using tape drives is that data is stored on tape by sequential access; to read data from anywhere on the tape, you must start at the beginning of the tape and read until you come to the sought-after data.

Sequential access makes recovering files slow and inconvenient, which is why tapes are not used for general-purpose data storage.

The motherboard or an expansion card can provide external SATA (eSATA) ports for external drives. External SATA drives use a special external shielded SATA cable up to 2 meters long.

Seven-pin eSATA ports run at the same speed as the internal ports using SATA I, II, or III standards. The eSATA port is shaped differently from an internal SATA connector so as to prevent people from using the unshielded internal SATA data cables.

If you connect the cable in the wrong direction, the floppy drive light stays lit continuously and the drive does not work.

Some connectors allow you to insert the cable only in one direction. Be sure the end of the cable with the twist connects to the drive and the other end to the motherboard.

Tapes currently have capacities up to 3.0 TB compressed and come in several types and formats.

Some tape drives and tape cartridges support WORM (write once and read many). WORM drives and cartridges assure that data written on the tape will not be deleted or overwritten. Most tape drives come bundled with backup software to use them.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology), which is used to predict when a drive is likely to fail.

System BIOS uses S.M.A.R.T. to monitor drive performance, temperature, and other factors. For magnetic drives, it monitors disk spin-up time, distance between the head and the disk, and other mechanical activities of the drive.

If you are mounting a hard drive into a bay that is too large, a universal bay kit can help you securely fit the drive into the bay.

The adapter spans the distance between the sides of the drive and the bay. Because SSD drives are usually smaller than magnetic drives, you're likely to need a bay kit to fit these drives into most computer cases.

In an SSD drive, flash memory is stored on EEPROM (Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) chips inside the drive housing.

The chips contain grids of rows and columns with two transistors at each intersection that hold a zero or one bit. One of these transistors is called a floating gate and accepts the zero or one state according to a logic test called NAND (stands for "Not AND").

The master or slave designations are made by setting jumpers or DIP switches on the devices, or by using a special cable-select data cable.

The connectors on a PATA 80-conductor cable are color-coded. Use the blue end to connect to the motherboard; use the black end to connect to the drive. If you only have one drive connected to the cable, put it on the black connector at the end of the cable, not the gray connector in the middle.

All the read/write heads are controlled by an actuator, which moves the read/write heads across the disk surfaces in unison.

The disk surfaces are covered with a magnetic medium that can hold data as magnetize spots. The spindle rotates at 5400, 7200, 10,000, or 15,000 RPM (revolutions per minute). The faster the spindle, the better performing the drive.

5. Check the motherboard documentation to find out which SATA connectors on the board to use first.

The documentation says the two blue SATA connectors support 6.0 GB/s and slower speeds, and the two black and one red SATA connectors support 3.0 GB/s and slower speeds. On this board, be sure to connect your fastest hard drive to a blue connector. For both the drive and the motherboard, you can only plug the cable into the connector in one direction.

When selecting a tape drive, consider how many and what type of cartridges the drive can use and how it interfaces with the computer.

The drive might be able to read from more types of cartridges than it can write to.

A solid state drive (SSD), also called a solid state device (SSD), is called solid state because it has no moving parts.

The drives are built using nonvolatile memory, which is similar to that used for USB flash drives. Recall that this type of memory does not lose its data even after the power is turned off.

Some hard drives are hybrid hard drives, using both technologies.

The flash component is used as a buffer to improve drive performance. Some hybrid drives perform just as well as an SSD drive. For a hybrid drive to function, the operating system must support it. Windows 7/Vista technology that supports a hybrid drive is called ReadyDrive.

Before an SSD or magnetic drive leaves the factory, sector markings are written to it in a process called low-level formatting. (This formatting is different from the high-level formatting that Windows does after a drive is installed in a computer.)

The hard drive firmware, BIOS, and the OS use a simple sequential numbering system called logical block addressing (LBA) to address all the sectors on the drive.

If a motherboard does not have an embedded SCSI controller, the gateway from the SCSI bus to the system bus is the 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 on the card for a ribbon cable or round cable to connect to internal devices, and an external port that supports external devices.

4. The cache or buffer size. For magnetic hard drives, buffer memory improves hard drive performance and can range in size from 2 MB to 64 MB.

The more the better, though the cost goes up as the size increases. A buffer helps because the hard drive reads ahead of the requested data and stores the extra data in the buffer. Buffering especially improves performance when managing large files, such as when working with videos or movies.

The host adapter is assigned SCSI ID 7, which has the highest priority over all other devices.

The priority order is 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, and 8. The host adapter can be at either end of the chain or somewhere in the middle.

A magnetic hard drive has 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.

The top and bottom of each disk have a read/write head that moves across the disk surface as all the disks rotate on a spindle.

1. Shut down the computer and unplug it.

Then press the power button for three seconds to drain residual power. Remove the computer case cover. Check that you have an available power cord from the power supply for the drive.

Unplug the cage fan from its power source. Turn the handle on each locking pin counterclockwise to remove it.

Then slide the bay to the front and out of the case. Insert the hard drive in the bay, and use two screws on each side to anchor the drive in the bay. Slide the bay back into the case, and reinstall the locking pins. Plug in the cage fan power cord.

An optical drive must follow the ATAPI (Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface) standard in order to connect to a system using an IDE connector.

Therefore, if you see ATAPI mentioned in an ad for a CD or DVD drive, know that the text means the drive connects to the motherboard using an IDE connector or header.

To get the best performance from the system, the system BIOS and the hard drive must support the same standard. If they don't support the same standard, they revert to the slower standard that both can use, or the drive will not work at all.

Therefore, you need to know what standards the motherboard or controller card providing the drive interface can use. For the motherboard, you can look at BIOS setup screens to see which standards are mentioned.

4. When using screws to secure the drive, carefully, without disturbing the drive, turn the case over and put one or two screws on the other side of the drive.

To best secure the drive in the case, use two screws on each side of the drive.

All RAID configurations can be accomplished at the hardware level (called hardware RAID) or at the operating system level (called software RAID).

Using Windows to implement software RAID, the Disk Management utility is used to configure a group of hard drives in a RAID array. Software RAID is not recommended by Microsoft. Hardware RAID is generally faster than software RAID.

Floppy drives: You almost never see them, but they're still covered on the A+ exam, so you need to know about them.

We'll try to make this as brief and painless as possible. A 3 1/2" high-density floppy disk drive (FDD) holds a mere 1.44 MB of data. When using floppy disks, know that to write to the disk, the write-protect notch must be closed.

Hardware RAID can be set up by using a RAID controller that is part of the motherboard BIOS or by using a RAID controller expansion card.

When installing a hardware RAID system, for best performance, all hard drives in an array should be identical in brand, size, speed, and other features. Also, if Windows is to be installed on a hard drive that is part of a RAID array, RAID must be implemented before Windows is installed.

You must decide which IDE connector to use, and if another drive will share the same IDE data cable with your new drive.

When possible, leave the hard drive as the single drive on one channel, so that it does not compete with another drive for access to the channel and possibly slow down performance. Use the primary channel before you use the secondary channel. Place the fastest devices on the primary channel and the slower devices on the secondary channel.

Some hard drives have a cable-select configuration option.

When using an 80-conductor cable-select cable, the drive nearest the motherboard is the master, and the drive farthest from the motherboard is the slave. You can recognize a cable-select cable by a small hole somewhere in the data cable or by labels (master or slave) on the connectors.

If you have a PATA drive and a SATA connector on the motherboard, or you have a SATA drive and a PATA connector on the motherboard, you can purchase an adapter to make the hard drive connector fit your motherboard connector.

When you use a converter, know that the drive will run at the slower PATA speed.

However, know that when installing a drive, you don't need to know which ATA standard a hard drive supports because the startup BIOS uses autodetection.

With autodetection, the BIOS detects the new drive and automatically selects the correct drive capacity and configuration, including the best possible standard supported by both the hard drive and the motherboard.

How is your system configured? Is everything working properly? Verify which of your system's devices are working before installing a new one. Later, if a device does not work, the information will help you isolate the problem.

Write down what you know about the system that might be important later. When installing hardware and software, don't install too many things at once. Install one device, start the system, and confirm that the new device is working before installing another.

If your power supply doesn't have the smaller Berg connector for the floppy drive,

You can buy a Molex-to-Berg converter to accommodate the floppy drive power connector.

You can also purchase a SATA and/or PATA controller card that can provide internal PATA or SATA connectors and external eSATA connectors.

You might want to use a controller card when (1) the motherboard drive connectors are not functioning, or (2) the motherboard does not support an ATA standard you want to implement (such as a SATA III drive).