EXERCISE 1-Pre-Final

*Hardrive*
-is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, "drive" refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit with fixed media.

The Platters
-A hard disk platter (or disk) is a component of a hard disk drive: it is the circular disk on which the magnetic data are stored. The rigid nature of the platters in a hard drive is what gives them their name (as opposed to the flexible materials which are used to make floppy disks). Hard drives typically have several platters which are mounted on the same spindle.

Spindle/Motor
-The spindle motor, also sometimes called the spindle shaft, is responsible for turning the hard disk platters, allowing the hard drive to operate. The spindle motor is sort of a "work horse" of the hard disk. It's not flashy, but it must provide stable, reliable and consistent turning power for thousands of hours of often continuous use, to allow the hard disk to function properly. In fact, many drive failures are actually failures with the spindle motor, not the data storage systems. Spindle is the axis on which the platters of a computer hard disk spin. Database performance can be improved by spindling, the action of mounting data files and index files on different hard disks so that contention for read or write resources is diminished.


The read/Writer Heads
- Disk read/write heads are mechanisms that read data from or write data to disk drives. The heads have gone through a number of changes over the years.

Ribbon Cable
-A ribbon cable (also known as multi-wire planar cable) is a cable with many conducting wires running parallel to each other on the same flat plane. As a result the cable is wide and flat rather than round. Its name comes from the resemblance of the cable to a piece of ribbon (which is likewise wide and flat).

Base Casting
-The bottom of the disk is often called the base casting, the name coming from the manufacturing process used to create the single piece of aluminum from which it is normally made. The drive mechanics are placed into the base casting, and another piece of usually aluminum is placed on top to enclose the heads and platters. A rubber gasket is placed between the base and cover to ensure a tight seal. On some drives, a metallic tape seal is applied around the perimeter of the drive to fully enclose the drive. The exact shape of the base and cover can vary significantly from drive to drive.


*Motherboard*
-is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. It is also known as a mainboard, baseboard, system board, or, on Apple computers, a logic board, and is sometimes abbreviated as mobo.

IDE Connector
-Most motherboards have two IDE connectors, which allow two drives to be attached to each connector. One drive is set to master and the other drive is set to slave by using a jumper that is normally located on the back of the drive. This allows a total of four IDE devices, (or drives), to be attached to a typical computer.

Processor Socket
- widely used to describe the connector linking the motherboard to the CPU(s) in certain types of desktop and server computers, particularly those compatible with the Intel x86 architecture.

AGP
-(also called Advanced Graphics Port, often shortened to AGP) is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a graphics card to a computer's motherboard, primarily to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics.

PCI
-is a computer expansion card interface format. It was designed to replace CI, PCI-X (interface card interface) and AGP (graphics card interface). PCIe is based around serial links called lanes.

SATA
-is a computer bus primarily designed for transfer of data between a computer and storage devices (like hard disks or optical drives).

South Bridge
-The south bridge is often referred to as the I/O controller. The features of the south bridge change less often than the those of the north bridge. From chipset to chipset, nearly all south bridges have support for integrated sound, LAN and modem, ATA and USB.

Memory
-Memory refer to computer components, devices and recording media that retain digital data used for computing for some interval of time. Computer storage provides one of the core functions of the modern computer, that of information retention.

*Monitor*
-A computer display device. A computer programming utility for examining and modifying memory-resident machine code programs. A programming interface for synchronising concurrent access to a set of variables in a computer program. A hardware device that measures electrical events such as pulses or voltage levels in a digital computer.

*System Unit*
-The main part, processing unit and devices, of a microcomputer is a system unit.

*Keyboard*
-is a peripheral partially modelled after the typewriter keyboard. Keyboards are designed for the input of text and characters and also to control the operation of a computer.

*Printer*
-produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies.

*Mouse*
-functions as a pointing device by detecting two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting surface. Physically, a mouse consists of a small case, held under one of the user's hands, with one or more buttons.