| A | B |
|---|
| A:Drive | The floppy drive that is connected to the data cable connector with the twist in the ribbon cable; the single floppy drive on most computers. |
| Address bus | pathway between the CPU and memory that carries information about where data is stored in memory. |
| ATA | Advanced Technology Attachment; The ANSI specification for IDE hard drives; the drive controller is integrated onto the drive itself. |
| ATAPI | Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface; The ANSI specification for ATA (IDE) CD-ROM and tape drives. |
| Berg | The small 4-pin connector on power supplies used to plug into newer 3 1/2" floppy drives. |
| Binary | The numbering system containing only 1's and 0's used by computers; a 0 is off and a 1 is on. |
| BIOS | Basic Input Output System; the program stored in ROM that starts the computer, allows communication between the various hardware devices in the computer devices transfer data. |
| C: Drive | The primary hard disk letter assignment. |
| CD | Compact Disc; optical disk used to store audio or data files. |
| CD Drives | a device that reads CD-ROM disks |
| CMOS | Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor; most widely used material for integrated circuit chips. |
| Components | part of a whole system; individual part that has a specific function; FRU. |
| Disk Drive | Component that reads and writes data magnetically or optically onto a storage disk |
| Diskette | also known as a floppy disk; holds data on a magnetically charded piece of mylar 3 1/2 inches in diameter. |
| DVD | Digital Video Disk or Digital Versatile Disk; optical storage media used for movies and data; holds 4.7GB |
| EIDE | Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics; ATAPI compatible interface that supports multiple channels for connecting up to 4 hard drives and non-hard drive devices like CD-ROMs and tape drives. |
| FDD | Floppy Disk Drive; important piece of hardware on early computers, allowing them to add data to the computer; later mostly replaced by CD-ROM drives. |
| Floppy Disk | early storage media that held 1.44MB of data |
| Hard Disk | the primary storage devices on a computer consisting of magnetic spinning platters and read/write heads |
| Hard drive capacity | the amount of storage of a hard drive measured in gigabytes |
| I/O addresses | Input/Output Addresses; unique hexadecimal numbers assigned to every device in a computer used for the CPU to identify and signal the device; ex.03F0-03F8 is the range of numbers assigned to the COM1 serial port. |
| IDE | Integrated Drive Electronics; interface for connecting hard drives, optical disks and tape drives to a PC; developed in 1986. |
| IRQ | Interrupt Request; number used by a hardware device to get the attention of the CPU; ex.7 is for LPT1. |
| Magnetic tape | storage media used mainly for backups; read to and written from in sequential order. |
| Master | controller device that initiates commands and has a slave device to respond to the commands. |
| Megabyte | unit of storage equal to 1,048,576 or 1 million bytes. |
| Molex | the 4-pin power connector that supplies power from the power supply the most storage devices except the floppy drive. |
| MPEG | Moving Pictures Experts Group; standards organization working with video and audio encoding standards. |
| Non-volatile memory | memory that holds its contents with the power removed |
| Optical Drive | computer hardware device that reads of writes data or music as pits etched into a disk surface with laser. |
| Platter | circular magnetic disk used to store data in a hard drive |
| Removable media | storage devices that can have data written to and read from them and can be easily moved from one computer to another |
| Ribbon cable | thin, flat, conductor used to attach floppy drives and hard drives or other IDE devices to the motherboard |
| RPM | Revolutions Per Minute; the speed at which the platters rotate on a hard drive. |
| Sectors | the smallest addressable storage unit on a hard drive |
| Slave | device that receives commands from a master devices and responds according to the commands received |
| Tape Drive | storage device that only allows for sequential access of data; takes extra time to wind media to find a particular piece of data; typically used for a backup device. |
| UDMA | Ultra Direct Memory Access; protocol for transferring data from the computer's hard drive to RAM without interrupting the CPU. |
| USB Flash drives | flash memory card that many people carry data on to get the data from one computer to another. |
| Zip drive | 3.5" drive that uses high capacity floppy disks of 100 to 750MB;the diskettes are much thicker than a regular floppy disk. |
