Hard Drive Technologies Flashcards
Hard Drives
A hard drive is a magnetic drive has rotational media.
IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics): Sometimes referred to as EIDE. This defines any hard drive that has a built-in controller, which is pretty much all hard drives.
ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment): This is a standard that used to be the language to talk to hard drives. It is also the standard in terms of connections and data speed.
Parallel ATA (Pata): Older drive that used a 40 pin connector.
Serial ATA (SATA) Newer hard drive
SATA drives have the same connectors regardless of their size.
SATA cables can be up to 1 meter long. A typical length is around 18”.
External SATA (eSATA) connector: Is more for external hard drives. It is designed for hot plug support so it can be plugged and unplugged whenever you need.
Micro SATA (mSATA) connector: Tiny connector and an alternative to SATA. mSATA is used for a hard drive mounted directly to a motherboard.
SATA has been the standard since 2004.
SATA 1: Came out in 2003 ran at 1.5 Gbit/s
SATA 2: Came out in 2004 ran at 3 Gbit/s. Added native command queuing.
Native Command Queuing allows the hard drive to rearrange the order of data so the hard drive can minimize the number of rotations necessary to get the data.
eSATA: Came out in 2004. It does not provide power. It runs at any speed that a regular device can. This is based on the SATA capability of the motherboard. The maximum cable length is 2 meters.
SATA 3: Came out in 2009 runs at 6 Gbit/s.
Advanced Host Controller Interface(AHCI): This is located in system setup. It has to be turned on for it to be functional. It is located under SATA configuration in the BIOS. Look for SATA Mode Selection. If windows is already installed and AHCI is not turned on, windows will have to be completely reinstalled if you turn it on.
Solid State Drives
SSD(Solid State Drive): Uses standard SATA cables and connections.
SSD uses flash memory similar to a phone or camera.
SSD has a speed of better than a Gbps.
NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification). It is a standard built to talk to SSD’s.
NVMe runs on the PCI bus.
NVMe is supported by Windows 8.1 and up. and Windows 7 with updates.
NVMe must be supported by your motherboard.
SSD must be NVMe. (Older SSD’s are not NVMe).
SSD and NVMe can be installed using a PCI Express card.
(m.2) Is a connector within the motherboard that can be used for SSD drives.
SATAe ports on the motherboard can be used for SSD drives.
m. 2 and SATAe were designed to be legacy compatible where they are able to connect to newer NVMe drives and SATA drives.
m. 2 installation is done by locating the m.2 connector on the motherboard. One screw is installed through the drive once it is plugged into place.
m. 2 drives come in SATA or NVMe.
Questions about how NVMe works!
Hard Drive Overview
SATA hard drive Data is stored in discreet chunks called sectors.
Modern hard drives have sectors that are 4,096 bytes.
Older hard drives were only 512 bytes.
SSD stores their memory on flash memory.
SSD stores its data in discreet chunks called pages. Each page = 4096 bytes.
LBA(Logical Block Addressing) Lives on the mass storage device itself and takes whatever type of mass storage information available within the drive and presents the data in little discreet containers called blocks. The operating system does not need to know anything about the inner workings of the mass storage device.
File System on your computer acts as a translator with LBA.
Questions/// How does the file system communicate with LBA?
RAID Overview
RAID(Randam Array Of Indepandante Devices): It is based on the premise that it is better to have a lot of smaller drives that act like one big drive than one big drive.
RAID benefits with speed and data safety.
RAID 0: Is known as striping. You have to have at least two hard drives. The system will not see two drives, it will just see an array. If one of the drives were to disappear you would lose every other cluster of a document. RAID 0 is dangerous because of this.
RAID 1: Is mirroring with at least two hard drives. As each cluster is saved it makes two copies and writes one to each drive. Both drives store the same information. RAID 1 does not speed things up, it can actually slow things down. Data is kept safer with this arrangement.
Drive Duplexing is a form of RAID 1 where there are two separate controllers. One feeding each drive in the array.
RAID 5: Creates a parity. This is done with 3 drives. Any one drive can be lost and the files can be rebuilt with the parity. RAID 5 is a little bit faster and it gives data security.
RAID 1 + 0 or RAID 10: RAID 10 is a stripe of mirrors done with a minimum of 4 drives. Two copies of each file are sent independently to each drive similarly to RAID 1 however the mirrors alternate between the two sets of drives.
Questions// How are all of the RAID styles implemented?
Hardware RAID
Hardware RAID is where there is some type of controller or something built into the system that sets up the RAID arrays. When it is done, it just presents the arrays as one big volume to the operating system itself.
Firmware RAID: This uses a motherboard that has built in RAID functionality.
2 TB drives show up as 1.8 TB in some areas of the system.
Have a current backup if adding to an existing machine.
RAID needs to be configured in the system setup after the drives are plugged in.
RAID 5 can lose one drive safely.
Windows will not know anything about the RAID array.
Everything with the RAID array has to be done at the BIOS level.
Boot Order
All devices have to be plugged in before you enter the BIOS setup.
UEFI:
Depending on the situation, you may need to boot from a device other than the hard drive.
From the system setup, you can change the boot order to check optical drives, thumb drives, and so on.
Many modern systems enable you to change the boot order outside the system setup.
Questions// What is UEFI and how can you change the boot order outside the system setup.
