Project Questions that Must Be Answered

 

 

Hard Drive Technology Know/be able to answer the following:

  • What is low level formatting and what does it do to your hard drive. When would you use it?
  • What is precompensation and how does it speed up the writing of data?
  • What kind of cable does an IDE drive use? (Number of pins.)
  • Be able to identify tracks, sectors, the FAT, MBR, and other components on the platter.
  • What does the OS “see” an IDE drive as?
  • How many devices can be on an IDE or EIDE channel?
  • What is the makeup of an IDE circuit board?
  • What DOS commands can be used with hard drives?
  • What is the purpose of zone bit recording and how does it speed up reading and writing?

SCSI Drives Know and be able to answer the following:

  • How more than one SCSI device can communicate on a chain.
  • How SCSI IDs are defined.
  • How many devices can communicate on one chain.
  • Define: LUN, DEV NR, SCAC, SCAM, ultra scsi, wide scsi, termination
  • What devices in a SCSI chain should be terminated.
  • The difference between SCSI BIOS and system BIOS.
  • Which takes precedence, SCSI BIOS or system BIOS.
  • What role the host adapter plays in communications.
  • Sizes of cables used on narrow and wide scsi.
  • Types of terminators and which is most effective.
  • How a disk is prepared for use.
  • The analogy of SCSI to networks.
  • Types of drivers used with SCSI

Logical Organization of Drives Know and be able to answer the following:

  • Know how partitioning works and where the OS should be on a partitioned drive.
  • Know the utilities that can be used to fix drives in Windows 98 and DOS
  • Know how many tracks per sector you have on IDE drives.
  • Know what the FAT, MBR, Partition table, and root directory are.
  • Know the length of the partition table.
  • Know what the boot record is.
  • Know the difference between primary and extended partitions and how many you can have of each.
  • Know the DOS commands for managing the hard drive.
  • Know the differences among FAT16, FAT32, and FAT12.
  • How long are root directory entries?
  • What is a cluster and how does using some file systems waste space due to clusters?
  • DOS based utility programs.
  • What size clusters are used for FAT16 and FAT32?
  • How many entries is a FAT16 root directory size limited to?

DOS know and be able to use:

  • How to use FDISk
  • DOS commands
  • How clusters work.
  • Define lost clusters.
  • Define a cross linked file.
  • What is fragmentation?
  • What is a virtual drive? Disk caching?

New Storage:

  • What are the new things on the horizon?
  • Where can you find out more information?
  • Describe the following technologies
    • HAMR
    • Spintronics technology/UB Sensor
    • Holographic storage
    • Future of SAN (Storage Area Networks)
    • Other