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Belgium Campus – Coa1x1– day 5

Computer architecture

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Introduction
All information needs to be stored
somewhere. It’s a simple fact of life.
At an office, you may have letters,
contracts, etc. that need to be stored
somewhere to make them easily
accessible and retrievable.
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Common disks
With computers, you have various types of electronic information to store, including data
files, application files, and configuration files.

Small Computer
SATA disk Solid state
IDE disk systems Systems Flash drives
systems drives (SSD)
Interface (SCSI)

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Hard disk
system
To locate the data
The hard disk system contains more accurate on a
three critical components: the
track, the track is
controller, the hard disk and the
host adapter.
divided into sectors.
A sector contains
exactly 512 bytes of
data.

Each platter is divided into circles

where the data is stored on. Such a
circle is called a track. One platter
can have tens of thousands of
tracks.

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Components
The hard disk system contains three critical components: the controller, the
hard disk and the host adapter.

Controller Hard disk Host adapter

Sends signals to the various This stores information The host adapter is the
motors in the disk and on small disks stacked translator, converting signals
receives signals from the together and placed in from the hard drive and
sensors inside the drive. an enclosure. controller to signals the
computer can understand.

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Cassette tapes
Tapes

Must fast-forward or reverse.

Recording material is coated onto a thin plastic strip. Hard disk
vs hard disks The read/write head touches the tape directly.
Moves over the head at about 5.08 cm per second. system
Hard disks
The hard disk system contains three
Recording material is layered onto a high-precision aluminum
critical or glassthe
components: disk.
controller,
You can move to any point on the surface of the disk almost
the hard instantly.
disk and the host adapter.
The read/write head "flies" over the disk, never actually touching it.
Can spin underneath its head at speeds up to 273 km/h.

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Hard disk capacity

Files Hard disk capacity

A file is simply a named collection of A typical desktop computer can

bytes. The bytes might be the ASCII have between 128GB and 1TB.
codes for the characters of a text file, These are typically SATA but can
or they could be the pixel colours for also be SSD drives. Data is
a JPG image. stored as files.

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Hard disk performance

There are two ways to measure the performance of a hard disk.

Data rate Seek time

The data rate is the number of bytes The seek time is the amount of time
per second that the drive can deliver between when the CPU requests a file
to the CPU. Rates between 5 and 40 and when the first byte of the file is
megabytes per second are common. sent to the CPU. Times between 10
and 20 milliseconds are common.

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Hard disk technologies

IDE and EIDE

Has the controller right on the drive itself. Uses a relatively short cable to
connect the drive/controller to the system.

This decreases signal loss (thus increasing reliability) making

the drive easier to install.

Enhanced IDE (EIDE) can support drives of several gigabytes with data transfer rates
IDE Disk system greater than 10Mbps.

IDE (also known as AT Attachment

Ultra ATA/66
interface or ATA) was a simple
one: put the controller right on Ultra ATA/66 uses a regular IDE cable, with extra wires leading nowhere to
the drive itself and use a relatively prevent line noise. 66MB/s is the maximum burst transfer rate.
short cable to connect the
drive/controller to the system

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Installing a hard disk

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Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Disks

Increased data transfer rate

ATA is capable of 150/300/600 MBs/second.

Easy cable management and cable length

A SATA cable can be up to 3.3 feet (1 meter) in length.

SATA hard disks Increased airflow

SATA cables are also smaller in size than a PATA (IDE) cable, allowing for increased airflow.

It provides faster data transfer

speeds, more bandwidth, more Support for more drives
potential for speed increases in There are four to six SATA connections on a computer motherboard.
future generations and better data
integrity.

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Solid State Drives

SSD drives
These drives do not contain any physical disks like their predecessors
but instead work similarly to flash drives that store data on chips.
These drives contain no moving parts and use less electricity to
power. These drives are silent, more resistant to physical shock, and
have lower latency.

Latency - the delay before a transfer of data begins

following an instruction for its transfer.

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Hard disk partitions

Partition types File systems

There are two partition A file system or filesystem,

types: Primary partitions controls how data is stored
and an extended partition. and retrieved. It tells us where
A hard drive can only have one piece of data stops and
up to 4 partitions. the next begins

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partition types
Primary Partition

A primary partition is a partition on which you can install an operating system . A primary partition
with an operating system installed on it is used when the computer starts to load the OS.

Extended Partition

An extended partition is a partition that can be divided into additional logical drives . Unlike a
primary partition, you don't need to assign it a drive letter and install a file system. Instead, you can
use the operating system to create an additional number of logical drives within the extended
partition.

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file systems

NTFS

NT file system (NTFS), which is also sometimes called the New Technology File System, is a
process that the Windows NT operating system uses for storing, organizing, and finding files on a
hard disk efficiently.

FAT32

FAT32 is a disk format or filing system used to organise the files stored on a disk drive. The disk
drive is marked up into addressable chunks called sectors and a “File Allocation Table” or FAT is
created at the start of the drive so that each piece of information in the file can be found by the
host computer.

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Optical disk drives

1 st generation 2 nd generation 3 rd generation 4 th generation

Initially, optical discs were used to Second-generation optical discs Third-generation optical discs Formats such as the Holographic
store music and computer were for storing great amounts of include disks such as Blu-ray disks. Versatile Disc, LS-R, and the
software. data, including broadcast-quality These are meant for distributing Protein-coated disc are in
digital video. high-definition video (up to 4K) development and, potentially, can
and support greater data storage hold more than 1TB.
capacities.

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Activity
In groups of 3, create a short presentation of about 2
minutes where you discuss the future of physical
storage vs cloud storage. Be sure to use examples
from existing providers to support your statements.

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