Study Lab

Don't miss the Study Lab materials found on the CD accompanying this book. Each Study Lab is tailored to the individual chapters in this book, meaning that you'll quickly be able to determine which topics you understand well enough to pass the exam and which topics need more study. The Study Labs are presented in printable PDF format so that you can take them with you to study at work, on the road, or even in your car just before test time!

The Absolute Minimum

• The most common type of floppy drive is the 1.44MB 3.5-inch drive, which uses DSHD media.

• 3.5-inch floppy drives use a 34-pin cable, which is twisted to enable the system to distinguish drive A: from drive B:.

• Each IDE channel can handle up to two ATA/IDE drives.

• Master and slave jumpers are used with the 40-wire ATA/IDE cable to determine drive priority and can also be used with the 80-wire cable.

• Cable select uses different positions on the 80-wire UDMA-66 cable to determine drive priority. Both drives must be jumpered as cable select to use this feature.

• Serial ATA (SATA) is a high-speed version of ATA that uses a seven-wire cable that runs directly from the host adapter to the drive.

• ATA RAID uses two or more ATA drives to create striped (RAID 0) or mirrored (RAID 1) drive arrays for extra read/write speed or extra reliability.

• LBA (Logical Block Addressing) translation is necessary on all ATA/IDE drives over 528MB (504MiB) to enable Windows to use the entire capacity of the drive.

• Each device in a SCSI daisy-chain must use a unique device ID, and each end of the daisy-chain must be terminated .

• The transfer rates of CD and DVD drives are measured using a X-rating value, but DVD drives use a larger value for X than CD drives do.

• CD/DVD mastering creates a layout from files selected by the user and transferred to a recordable CD or DVD. The process is often called CD or DVD burning.

• Packet writing typically uses rewritable CD or DVD media to store drag-and-drop files, using the drive like a large floppy disk.

• The actual storage capacity of a tape drive varies with whether the data is stored in compressed or noncompressed (native) mode and the amount of compression that can be performed with different types of data.