Chapter 8 Solutions

Copyright 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies

Mike Meyers A+ Guide: PC Technician Chapter 8 Solutions Key Term Quiz

1. An ATA hard drive connects to the controller with a 40-pin ribbon cable while an UltraATA drive uses an 80-wire cable. 2. A cylinder is composed of a group of tracks of the same diameter that the read/write heads can access without moving. 3. To install a parallel ATA device to a serial ATA controller, use a tiny card called a SATA bridge. 4. LBA, developed by Western Digital, uses sector translation to get around the limits of 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors/track. 5. Seen in RAID 5, disk striping with parity uses at least three drives and combines the best features of disk mirroring and disk striping. 6. An Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI)-compliant CD-ROM drive installs and cables just like an EIDE drive. 7. The ANSI ATA committee adopted the ATA/ATAPI-6 standard, called Big Drives by Maxtor, that allows drives with more than 144 petabytes. 8. ATA/133 drives transfer data at 133 MBps. 9. Drives that use DMA modes bypass the CPU and send data directly to memory. 10. Small computer system interface (SCSI) devices require termination at both ends of a chain.

Multiple Choice Quiz

1. Which of the following is NOT used to compute storage capacity in CHS disk geometry?

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A. Sectors per track B. Tracks C. Heads D. Cylinders 2. Which level of RAID is disk striping with distributed parity? A. RAID 0 B. RAID 1 C. RAID 5 D. RAID 6 3. Which of the following is the most efficient encoding method? A. Partial ResponseMaximum Likelihood (PRML) B. Frequency modulation (FM) C. Run length limited (RLL) D. Modified frequency modulation (MFM) 4. Counting both channels, what is the maximum number of drives/devices that EIDE can support? A. One B. Two C. Seven D. Four 5. Which of the following is NOT true about cable select? A. Both drives/devices should be set for cable select. B. It requires a special cable with a pinhole through one wire. C. The colored stripe on the ribbon cable should align with pin 1 on the controller and drive.

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D. Position of the drives on the cable does not matter. 6. If you install two IDE drives on the same cable, how will the computer differentiate them? A. The CMOS setup allows you to configure them. B. You must set jumpers to determine which drive functions as master and which functions as slave. C. You will set jumpers so each drive will have a unique ID number. D. The drives will be differentiated by whether you place them before or after the twist in the ribbon cable. 7. What was the maximum hard drive size allowed by BIOS routines for the original AT command set? A. 528 MB B. 1024 MB C. 504 MB D. 1028 MB 8. Which of the following terms does NOT describe parallel ATA devices? A. IDE B. EIDE C. SCSI D. ATA 9. Shelby wants to add a new 100-GB hard drive to her computer. Which of the following will allow her to do so? A. CHS B. LBA C. ECHS

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D. INT13 (INT13 supports drives up to 137 GB.) 10. Which of the following techniques provides redundancy by using two disks and two controllers? A. Drive mirroring B. Drive duplexing C. Disk striping D. Disk striping with parity 11. How many wires does an Ultra DMA cable have? A. 24 B. 34 C. 40 D. 80 12. Billy just installed a second hard drive, but the autodetection utility in CMOS does not detect it. Sara told him he probably had the jumpers set incorrectly or had forgotten to connect the Molex power connector. John told him his new hard drive is probably bad and he should return it. Is Sara or John probably correct? A. Sara is correct. B. John is correct. C. Neither is correct. D. Either John or Sara may be correct. (It is more likely that Sarah is correct, but either Sara or John may be correct.) 13. Which of the following is NOT an advantage of serial ATA (SATA)? A. It is hot-swappable. B. Thinner cables provide better airflow inside the case. C. SATA provides faster data throughput than PATA.

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D. SATA cable must be shorter than PATA cables. (In fact, SATA cables have a maximum length of 1 meter; this extra length was an advantage compared to PATA cables, which are limited to 18 inches.) 14. Which of the following two CMOS configuration options are obsolete with todays hard drives? A. Cylinders and heads B. Heads and sectors C. Sectors and write precompensation D. Write precompensation and landing zone 15. What standard did the ANSI ATA committee adopt that increased disk storage capacity to more than 144 petabytes? A. ATA/ATAPI-6 B. LBA C. INT13 D. ECHS

Essay Quiz
1. Discuss at least three advantages of serial ATA over parallel ATA. Among the most important advantages of serial ATA are the ability to hot swap drives or devices, better airflow through use of the 7-wire cable, longer cable length (up to 1 meter for SATA instead of 18 inches for PATA), faster data transfer through serial bursts (eventual throughput speeds up to 600 MBps), and backward compatibility with PATA devices through the use of a SATA bridge. 2. Compare and contrast hardware and software RAID implementation. Software RAID, available through operating systems such as Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 Server or from third-party vendors, is inexpensive to set up since

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it does not require special controllers. Disk Management in Windows 2000 and XP Professional can do RAID 0 and 1, but not 5. With software RAID, the operating system controls the RAID functions, often resulting in slowdowns, as the operating system is overworked. Hardware RAID, whether SCSI or ATA, requires a controller chip that handle the RAID functions. One advantage of hardware RAID is the ability to hot-swap a bad drive without disturbing the operating system. Hardware RAID also offers more RAID levels than software RAID and is the preferred choice in spite of the extra cost. 3. Your friend Blaine has a Pentium III computer with a 100-MHz bus. Currently, it has only a 20-GB ATA/100 hard drive and a CD-RW drive. Since hes interested in graphics, he knows he needs more storage capacity and wants to add a second hard drive. What advice will you give him about selecting a new hard drive? Blaine can choose to install either ATA or SCSI hard drive. He must be aware of the following: ATA (also called IDE or EIDE) drives come in two basic flavors, namely, parallel ATA (PATA) and serial ATA (SATA). ATA interface requires a 40-pin ribbon cable and a built-in controller on the drive itself. Older drives use a 40wire cable, whereas UltraDMA drives use an 80-wire cable. A single cable can connect up to two hard drives. Jumper settings determine which drive functions as master and which functions as slave. With cable select jumper setting, the position on the cable determines which drive will be master or slave. Make sure you have the jumpers set properly or the computer won't be able to access the drives. SCSI chains multiple devices to a single controller. This makes it a natural for RAID technology. RAID is a technique of using multiple drives for data protection and increasing speed. But they are very expensive. Parallel ATA has limitations and problems. Flat ribbon cables impede airflow and can be no longer than 18 inches. PATA is not hot-swappable. Also, the technology has reached its limits for throughput.

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SATA is faster. Provides greater data throughput than PATA. The maximum SATA device cable length is 1 meter. SATA devices are hot-swappable. To install a parallel ATA device to a serial ATA controller, use a tiny card called a SATA bridge.

An ATA/100 or ultra DMA 5 drive can transfer 100 MBps of data. Current motherboards have ATA/66, ATA/100, or ATA/133 controllers built into them. ATA/100 and ATA/133 require the 80-wire cable.

Hard drives run at a set spindle speed. The faster the spindle speed, the faster the controller can store and retrieve data. Faster drives mean better system performance, but they can also cause the computer to overheat.

4. Use www.google.com or a site such as www.newegg.com to compare one of the following pairs of hard drives to determine their features including storage capacity, interface, RPM, and cost: Maxtor Model # 6Y120L0 and Maxtor Model # 6Y120M0 Western Digital Model # WD1200JB and Western Digital Model # WD1200JD All of the drives have the same storage capacity, but other features vary, including serial or parallel interface. Serial drives are slightly more expensive than their parallel counterparts. Here are some specific characteristics of the four drives: Maxtor Model # 6Y120L0 is a 120-GB drive with an Ultra ATA133 interface. It features a 9 ms seek time and 7,200 rpm with a 2-MB cache. Maxtor Model # 6Y120MO is also a 120 GB drive with a Serial ATA150 interface. It has a seek time of 9 ms, spins at 7,200 rpm, and has an 8-MB cache. Western Digital Model # WD1200JB is a 120-GB drive with an Ultra ATA100 interface. It spins at 7,200 rpm and has a seek time of 8.9 ms and an 8MB cache.

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Western Digital Model WD1200JD is another 120-GB drive with a serial ATA interface. It spins at 7,200 rpm, has an 8-MB cache, and lists a data transfer rate of 150 MBps maximum.

5. Hard drives include other features and characteristics not included in this chapter. Choose one of the following topics and use the Internet to define and explain it to the class. Zone bit recording Pixie dust hard drives Zone bit recording is a technique that places different numbers of sectors on different tracks, with the outer tracks having higher recording density than the inner tracks. It results in higher capacity drives that are more stable throughout. Both ATA and SCSI drives use zone-bit recording. Technically called antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) media, pixie dust hard drives were invented by IBM. These drives use a thin layer of ruthenium inside the hard drives to allow data to be packed more densely and thus dramatically increase the storage capacity of the drives. This technology should result in drives that can pack 100 Gb of data per square inch, as contrasted with 30 to 40 Gb of data with other current ATA technology.

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