Chapter 6 Review

Hybrid hard drives H-HDD sometimes called a Solid-state hybrid drive SSHD uses both technologies

The flash serves as a buffer to improve performance. OS must support it to function

What is the transfer speed for SATA 1? SATA 2? SATA 3?

1.5 Gb, 3Gb, 6Gb/sec

How much data can a double-sided, dual-layer DVD hold

15.9 GB

What physical sizes of hard drives are installed in laptops

2.5 and 1.8

How much data can a double-sided, single-layer BD hold

25 GB

How many hard drives are necessary to implement RAID 10

4

At what three speeds in revolutions per minute might the spindle inside a hard drive rotate

5400, 7200, or 10,000 RPM faster the better

SATA drive connects to one internal SATA on the motherboard using

7-pin SATA data cable and uses a 15-pin SATA power connector. Internal SATA data cable is up to 1 meter in length. Always use the connectors in order by MB user guide.

How much data can a CD hold

700 MB

Cluster

A hard drive divided onto tracks and sectors; several sectors make one cluster

When implementing RAID on a motherboard, where do you enable the feature

BIOS

When purchasing a hard drive, consider the following factors that affect performance, use, and price

Capacity of the drive, spindle speed, interface standard, and the cache or buffer size.

Some SATA drives have two power connector

Choose between the SATA power connector (which is the preferred connector) or the legacy 4-pin Molex connector, but never install two power cords to the drive at the same time because this could damage the drive

Hard disk drive HDD also called Hard drive HD magnetic

Comes in 2 sizes for personal computers: 3.5 for desktops and 2.5 for laptops and 1.8 for MP3's

Hot-swapping

Connect and disconnect a drive while the system is running. This is more expensive.

Hard drive and solid-state drive manufacturers

Crucial, Kingston Technology, Samsung, Seagate Technology and Maxtor, and Western Digital.

The cache or buffer size

For magnetic hard drives, buffer memory improves hard drive performance and can range in size from 2 MB to 128 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. If the next read is already in the buffer, the controller does not need to return to the spinning platters for the data. Buffering especially improves performance when managing large files, such as when working with videos or movies

Added precautions for working with a hard drive are as follows

Handle the drive carefully. Do not touch any exposed circuitry or chips. Prevent other people from touching exposed microchips on the drive. 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. If you must set down the drive outside the static-protective package, place it component-side-up on a flat surface. Do not place the drive on the computer case cover or on a metal table. If you're assembling a new system, in most situations, it's best to install drives before you install the motherboard so that you will not accidentally bump sensitive motherboard components with the drives.

What term describes the technology that allows you to exchange a hard drive without powering down the system

Hot-swapping

When purchasing a SATA hard drive, keep in mind that the SATA standards for the drive and the motherboard need to match.

If either the drive or the motherboard uses a slower SATA standard than the other device, the system will run at the slower speed

Y connector

If there are not enough power cords from a power supply, you can purchase a Y connector that can add an additional power cord.

Hard Drive Technologies and

Interface Standards A hard disk drive (HDD) comes in three sizes: 3.5" for desktop computers and 2.5" and 1.8" for laptops.

SATA-IO led by Intel developed SATA standards, and have oversight T13 committee

Interface standards for drives define data speeds and transfer methods between drive controller, UEFI/BIOS, the chipset on the motherboard, and the OS. The standard also defines the type of cables and connectors used.

When the OS addresses the sectors on a hard drive as one long list of sequential sectors, what is this technology called

LBA Logical block addressing

Supporting

Other Types of Storage Devices File systems a storage device might use in Windows include NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, and FAT.

Serial ATA SATA standard uses a serial data path, and a SATA data cable can accommodate a single SATA drive.

PATA allowed for 1 or 2 IDE connectors on a motherboard, using 40-pin data cable. 2 drives connect to 1 cable. SCSI scuzzy interface standard.

Which RAID level mirrors one hard drive with a second drive so that the same data is written to both drives

RAID 1 is the mirrored volume

Which RAID level stripes data across multiple drives to improve performance and also provides fault tolerance

RAID 5

Which costs more, a CD-R or a CD-RW disc

RW

Step 3: Install the drive

Shut down the computer and unplug it, Decide which bay will hold the drive, Secure one side of the drive with one or two screws, Secure the other side of the drive with one or two screws, Check the motherboard documentation to find out which SATA connectors on the board to use first, Connect a 15-pin SATA power connector or 4-pin Molex power connector from the power supply to the drive, Check all your connections and power up the system, verify the drive was recognized correctly, enter UEFI/BIOS setup and look for the drive.

Sata revision 2.x* Sata ii or Sata2 Serial ata-300 Sata/300 Sata-300 use 3 Gb/sec

The first SATA 2 standards were published by the t13 Committee (t13.org) within ata/atapi-8; later revisions of Sata ii were published by Sata-iO (sata-io.org), which now manages Sata standards. the standard first came out in 2006. Most motherboards used it by 2010.

The interface standard

Use the standards your motherboard supports. For SATA, most likely that will be SATA II or SATA III. For external drives, common standards are eSATA, FireWire 800 or 400, and SuperSpeed or Hi-Speed USB

A technology supported by both magnetic HD and SSD are S.M.A.R.T. Self-monitoring analysis and Reporting technology. Smart can be disabled in BIOS/UEFI setup. Malware has been known to give false smart alerts

Used to predict when a drive is likely to fail. UEFI/BIOS uses smart to monitor drive performance, temp, and other factors. For magnet it monitors disk spin-up time, distance between the head and the disk, and other activities. Report to Bios number of write operations, which is the best measurement of when the drive might fail

Fan cage

a computer case with a removable bay that has a fan at the front of the bay to help keep the drives cool.

What command-prompt command do you use to determine if a drive has bad sectors

chkdsk C: /r

External HD

connect by eSATA, FireWire, or USB. If port isn't fast enough install expansion card.

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

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

Use only 2 srews

placing two screws in diagonal positions across the drive can place pressure diagonally on the drive.

A SATA drive might have jumpers used to

set features such as the ability to power up from standby mode. Most likely, if jumpers are present on a SATA drive, the factory has set them as they should be and advises you not to change them

external SATA eSATA use a special external shielded SATA cable

up to 2 meters long. 7-pin eSATA ports run at the same speed as internal ports using SATA 1, 2, 3. eSATA is shaped differently from internal to prevent from using the unshielded internal SATA data cables.

Step 2: Read the documentation and prepare you work area

visualize all the steps in the installation. Preparation pays off every time. Set out your tools, documentation, new hardware, and notebook

You can also purchase a SATA controller card that can provide internal 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 a fast SATA standard that your hard drives use.

You want to install an SSD drive in your desktop computer, but the drive is far too narrow to fit snugly into the bays of your computer case. Which of the following do you do

Buy a bay adapter that will allow you to install the narrow drive in a desktop case bay

Step 1: Know your starting point

Do this by answering these questions: How is your system configured? Is everything working properly? Verify which of your system's devices are working before installing a new one

Tracks are data organized on a magnetic hard drive on concentric circles

Each track is divided into segments called sectors also called records. Old HD used sectors 512 bytes, current HD use 4096-byte sector.

Flash memory is stored on EEPROM chips inside the drive house and are limited as to the number of times transistors can be reprogrammed

Electronically erasable programmable read only memory. The chips contain grids of rows and columns with two transistors at each intersection that hold 0 or 1 bit. One of these transistors is called a floating gate and accepts the 0 or 1 state according to a logic test called NAND

What type of file system is used by SDXC memory cards

FAT file system

What type of file system is used by Blu-ray discs

Newer UDF file system or CDFS compact disc file system

Magnetic hard drive

Has 1, 2, 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

To get the best performance from the system, the system UEFI/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. There's no point in buying an expensive hard drive with features that your system cannot support.

If you are installing a new hard drive in a system that is to be used for a new Windows installation, boot from the Windows setup DVD, and follow the directions on the screen to install Windows on the new drive

If you are installing a second hard drive in a system that already has Windows installed on the first hard drive, you use the Disk Management utility in Windows to prepare the drive for first use (called partitioning and formatting the drive)

The spindle speed

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

Which type of flash memory card is currently the smallest type of card

Micro SDHC

Your friend has a Windows 8 desktop system that contains important data. He frantically calls you to say that when he turns on the computer, the lights on the front panel light up and he can hear the fan spin for a moment and then all goes dead. His most urgent problem is the data oon his hard drive, which is not backed up. The data is located in several folders on the drive. What is the quickest and easiest way to solve the most urgent problem, recovering the data? List the major steps in that process.

Power up in safe mode and backup the Files. You can do this by creating a Windows 8 recovery disc. Recovery will put the computer back to factory default values and all added programs and Files will need to be reinstalled, run the Windows update and install the service packs and the Internet security software. Also, you could remove the hard drive and attach it as a secondary hd on another computer. Then boot the other computer to windows and back up those Files.

Hard drives, optical drives, and tape drives use

SATA data connector and a power connector

Sata revision 1.x* Sata i or Sata1 Serial ata-150 Sata/150 Sata-150 have 1.5 Gb/sec

SATA, first introduced as an ata/atapi-7 standard, was published as part of a revision to the older pata standards managed by the t13 Committee (t13.org) that governed the pata standards.

Sata revision 3.x* Sata iii or Sata3 Serial ata-600 Sata/600 Sata-600 use 6 Gb/sec

Sata iii was first published by Sata-iO in 2009. Most new motherboards today use this standard.

What three types of technologies are used inside hard drives

Solid state, magnetic, and Smart

Disk surfaces are covered with magnetic medium that hold data as magnetized spots.

Spindle rotates 5400, 7200, or 10,000 RPM revolutions per minute. The faster the spindle, the better performing the drive.

Size of each block and total # of blocks on drives determine drive capacity.

Today drives are measured in GB or TB 1024 gigabytes. Magnetic drives are larger than SSD

The capacity of the drive

Today's hard drives for desktop systems are in the range of 1 TB for SSD drives to more than 6 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.

You install a SATA hard drive and then turn on the computer for the first time. You access UEFI/BIOS setup and see that the drive is not recognized. Which of the following do you do next

Verify that UEFI/BIOS autodetection is evabled

Step-by-step process of installing a SATA drive in a desktop system

When installing hardware and software, don't install too many things at once. If something goes wrong, you won't know what's causing the problem. Install one device, start the system, and confirm that the new device is working before installing another.

Mark each statement as true of false: a. PATA hard drives are older and slower than SATA hard drives b. SATA 1 is about 10 times faster than SATA 3 hard drives c. RAID 0 can be implemented using only a single hard drive d. RAID 5 requires five hard drives working together at the same speed and capacity e. You can use an internal SATA data cable with an eSATA port f. A SATA internal data cable has 7 pins

a. True b. False c. False d. False e. False f. True

LBA logical block addressing is a sequential numbering system

addresses all the sectors on the drive. SSD are marked into blocks, which communicate to motherboard and OS, what read/write to the drive in blocks just as with magnetic drives

Wear leveling

assures that the logical block addressing does not always address the same physical blocks in order to distribute write operations more evenly across the device

What command can you use to rebuild the BCD

bootrec /FixBoot

How many pins does a SATA internal data cable have? How many pins does a SATA power cable have

data 7-pins power 15-pin

Low-level formatting is a process before a magnetic drive leaves the factory, sector markings are written to it

different from high-level formatting that Windows does.

Bays designed for hard drive

do not have access to the outside of the case, unlike bays for optical drives and other drives in which discs are inserted.

Autodetection

the UEFI/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

Solid State drive SSD also called device has no moving parts 2.5, 1.8 size

the drives are nonvolatile memory and they don't lose data when powered off. The lifespan is based on the number of write operations to the drive. Read ops don't affect life span.

If the drive light on the front panel of the computer case does not work after you install a new drive

try reversing the LED wire on the front panel header on the motherboard.

SATA storage controller card by SYBA has

two external and two internal ports and supports 6 Gbps SATA III speeds