Western International University Material



Associate Level Material

Appendix I

Hard Drive

Hard drives are complex storage devices in a computer. When installing a hard drive, you must consider numerous interface standards. You also must think about specific factors, such as the computer’s application, the type of motherboard, speed and noise, gigabyte barriers, subsystems, future storage needs, and archival issues. Refer to Ch. 8 of A+ Guide To Managing & Maintaining Your PC for a deeper understanding of these issues.

You may measure hard drive performance by looking at three different sources of information. The first is the data rate, the number of bytes per second the driver can deliver to the processor. The second is the seek time, the amount of time it takes when the processor requests information from the driver and the first byte of information is delivered to the processor. The third is the memory capacity of the hard drive.

For this assignment, you replace the internal hard drives from the computer featured in the Computer Hardware Simulator (CHS). The current internal hard drives are old and starting to fail. You need to replace the current hard drives with similar drives or drives with more storage capacity. Search the Internet for three types of hard drives compatible with the CHS computer, and enter your information for each drive into the New Hard Drive Chart below. After comparing the two drives, make a recommendation on which you would purchase and justify your decision. You only have a budget of $45 to work with, so choose carefully.

Use the CHS Reference Chart to record the current components found on the CHS computer:



CHS Reference Chart

|CHS Computer |Component Model or Specification |

|Computer model and number | |

|Motherboard model number | |

|Operating system | |

|Current storage capacity | |

|Cache size | |

|Interface | |

|Transfer rate | |

|Seek time | |

|Dimension | |

|Other | |

New Hard Drive Chart

| |Hard drive #1 |Hard drive #2 |

|Manufacturer, model, and | | |

|series | | |

|Storage capacity | | |

|Data transfer rate | | |

|Rotational speed | | |

|Seek time | | |

|Cache size | | |

|Interface | | |

|Dimension | | |

|Other | | |

|Price | | |

|Web site | | |

Justify your choice of hard drive in the space below.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download