Accelerated Graphics Port

The Accelerated Graphics Port (also called Advanced Graphics Port, often abridged to AGP) is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a graphics card to a computer's motherboard, primarily to help in the speeding up of 3D computer graphics. Since 2004, AGP is being increasingly phased out in favor of PCI Express. However, as of middle 2008 new AGP cards and motherboards are still obtainable for purchase, although OEM driver support is negligible.

Universal Serial Bus

In information technology, Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a serial bus standard to interface devices to a host computer. USB was intended to allow many peripherals to be connected using a single consistent interface socket and to get better the plug-and-play capabilities by allowing hot exchange, that is, by allowing devices to be connected and disconnected without rebooting the computer or rotating off the device. Other suitable features comprise providing power to low-consumption devices without the require for an external power provide and allowing many devices to be used without requiring manufacturer exact, individual device drivers to be installed.

USB is intended to replace many legacy varieties of serial and similar ports. USB can connect computer peripherals such as mouse, keyboards, PDAs, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, personal media players, and flash drives. For many of those devices USB has become the standard connection method.

Industry Standard Architecture

The most common bus in the PC world, ISA stands for Industry Standard Architecture, and different many uses of the word "standard", in this case it in fact fits. The ISA bus is still a foundation in even the latest computers, despite the fact that it is mainly unchanged since it was prolonged to 16 bits in 1984! The ISA bus finally became a bottleneck to performance and was augmented with extra high-speed buses, but ISA persists because of the truly huge base of obtainable peripherals using the standard. Also, there are still many devices for which the ISA's speed is more than enough, and will be for a number of times to come

The choices made in important the main characteristics of the ISA bus--its width and speed--can be seen by looking at the processors with which it was balancing on early machines. The unique ISA bus on the IBM PC was 8 bits wide, shiny the 8 bit data width of the Intel 8088 processor's system bus, and ran at 4.77 MHz, again, the speed of the first 8088s. In 1984 the IBM AT was introduced using the Intel 80286; at the moment the bus was doubled to 16 bits (the 80286's data bus width) and increased to 8 MHz (the maximum speed of the original AT, which came in 6 MHz and 8 MHz versions).

Disk array

A disk array is a disk storage system which contains manifold disk drives. It is differentiated from a disk field, in that an array has cache memory and superior functionality, like RAID and virtualization.

Components of a characteristic disk array include:

* Disk array controllers
* Cache memories
* Disk enclosures
* Power supplies

Typically a disk array provides increased availability, resiliency and maintainability by using additional, redundant components (controllers, power supplies, fans, etc.), frequently up to the point at what time all single points of failure (SPOFs) are eliminated from the design. Additionally those mechanisms are often hot-swappable.

Typically, disk arrays are divided into five categories: NAS, Modular SAN arrays, Monolithic SAN arrays, Storage Virtualization and Utility SAN Arrays.

Solid-state drive

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store constant data. Unlike flash-based memory cards and USB flash drives, a SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus easily replacing it in the majority applications. An SSD using SRAM or DRAM (instead of flash memory) is frequently called a RAM-drive.

The unique usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the employ of semiconductor devices quite than electron tubes, but has in this background been adopted to differentiate solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are intrinsically less fragile than hard disks and so also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical delays, they typically enjoy low access time and latency.

SSDs have begun to appear in laptops, although they are at present considerably more expensive per unit of capacity than hard drives.

Firmware

Firmware is a special-purpose module of low-level software that serves two purposes. Initial, it acts like BIOS, enabling the device to get stock of its capabilities and to make those capabilities functional. Next, it coordinates the activities of the hardware throughout normal operation and contains programming constructs used to do those operations. For example, in a typical modem, the firmware will be a issue in establishing the modem's data rate, command set recognition, and particular feature completion.

Firmware is stored in a particular type of memory chip that doesn't misplace its storage capabilities when power is detached or lost. This non-volatile memory is classified as "read-only" memory (ROM) since the user, during usual operation, cannot modify the information stored there. The basic type of chip is called a PROM, which is programmable by some technician who has a programming console. An essential PROM receives one version of firmware. That code is "burned in" to the PROM and cannot be distorted. To update the firmware, the PROM must be actually removed from the device and replaced with a new chip.

Hard Disk Drive(HDD)

A hard disk drive (HDD), usually referred to as a hard drive, hard disk, or fixed disk drive, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on quickly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Severely speaking, "drive" refers to a device separate from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had detachable media; however, an HDD today is classically a sealed unit (apart from for a filtered vent hole to make equal air pressure) with fixed media.

The device that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) for PCs usually have sought times of about 12 milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance during a technique called caching.

There are more than a few interface standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer. The most common are IDE and SCSI.

Hard disk drives are sometimes called Winchester drives, Winchester being the name of one of the first well-liked hard disk drive technologies urbanized by IBM in 1973.