Week 28 - Drives and Their Logical Structures

Question 1

What is a HDD?

Answer 1

Hard Disk Drive

Mechanical spinning disk
Media transfer rate dependent on spin speed

Question 2

What is a SSD?

Answer 2

Solid State Drive

Flash memory based
Data stored in cells
Various form factors. Often non replaceable

Question 3

What is a hybrid hard drive?

Answer 3

Combo HDD and SDD
Spinning disk with flash memory on it
EG. Apple fusion drive (Christopher does not recommend them)

Question 4

What is a media transfer rate?

Answer 4

How quickly data can be written to or read from the disk

Question 5

What are some standard sizes for disk drives?

Answer 5

3.5”
2.5”
M.2
Proprietary

Question 6

What are 2 common types of drive busses?

Answer 6

Serial ATA

SATA III (6Gbit/s) = 600MB/s
Exceeds HDD requirements
Can limit SSDs

NVMe
Non-volatile Memory Express
Really PCIe (4X) - 4GB/s

Question 7

What are bridge chipsets used for?

Answer 7

Used to convert from native bus format to USB/TB/FW

Question 8

According to the bri’ish man “Christopher”, what RPM would we look for in a drive being used to store audio?

Answer 8

7400rpm

Question 9

What would we use either kind of drive for?

Answer 9

SSD: System, Sample, Audio
HDD: Audio, Backup

Question 10

How does a hard drive actually work?

Answer 10

A hard drive stores 0s and 1s as magnetic particles on the spinning disk. Depending on magnetic orientation of the particle, they will represent either a zero or a one.

A hard drive is made up of concentric circles (tracks) containing these magnetic particles.

Question 11

What does a bunch of adjacent magnetic particles on a disk’s track create?

Answer 11

Sectors

Which is the smallest unit of storage the drive can use

Question 12

What is a bad sector?

Answer 12

Areas of the disk that can no longer reliably hold data

Any data in a bad sector is often corrupted beyond saving

Question 13

What is the software “SMART”?

Answer 13

Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology

Software that predicts drive failure

(Not all external drives support this)

Question 14

What do OS and firmware see drives as?

Answer 14

As hardware devices and logical devices (a system of data structures used to access data storage)

Question 15

What is a partition?

Answer 15

Logical division of a drive

Often user-defined

Drives require at least 1 partition but may contain multiple

Partitions can contain a single FS (File System)

Creating a partition is called partitioning

Question 16

What does a partition table/map/record do

Answer 16

Tracks partition locations on a drive

Exists outside of volumes

Question 17

What is a file system?

Answer 17

Database for stored files required to:

Store (write) and retrieve (read) data
Keep track of available and used space
Manage file metadata

Different file systems are suited for different mediums