STORAGE DEVICES Part 1

STORAGE DEVICES

Part 1

I Vocabulary. Study the list of words and word combinations, focus on their equivalents.

inch – дюйм

obviously – очевидно

requirement – требование

legacy – наследие

data – данные

storage – хранение

medium – среда

hard drive – жесткий диск arm – рычаг

store – хранить

vice versa – наоборот

back and forth – назад и вперед

access – доступ

platter – пластина

expensive – дорогой

geometry – геометрия

environment –среда

spindle – шпиндель

spin – вертеться

revolution – оборот

actuator – привод

reliable – надежный

close-up – крупный план

measurement – измерение

jostle – толкать

cylinder – цилиндр

simultaneously – одновременно

configure – конфигурировать

amount – количество

determine – определять

motherboard – материнская плата

 solid-state drive – твердотельный накопитель

in the meantime – тем временем

available – имеющийся в наличии

flash drive – флэш-накопитель

throughout – на всем протяжении

II Watch the video and fill in the blanks with the words and expressions from the list

flash; storage; megabytes; throughout; floppy disk; inch; floppy; data;  connected; legacy

Let’s start with talking about these (1)___ drives, and that’s what FDD stands for, and you really don’t see floppy drives much anymore, they are technology that (2)___ many years have changed from these eight (3)___ disks that you see here to five and a quarter-inch and lastly three-and-a-half inch that were popular most recently. But it’s even hard now to find a new machine that has these floppy drives in them. Usually it says you have to get a USB (4)___ drive and just connect it that way so that you’re able to read and write floppy drives that you might have if you don’t have them in a system already. And if you look at a floppy drive you can see it’s pretty big, it’s three-and-a-half inches that’s why we get that size, and it can fit one point four four (5)___. That’s megabytes, that’s not gig, that’s one point four meg on a single disk. Obviously the very small USB keys that we use today, those (6)___ drives, store gigabytes and gigabytes of data, so you can see now why floppy disk drives really aren’t used much anymore.

If you run into a (7)___ machine that probably has a floppy drive in there and you may run it in some situations where people have piles of these floppy drives sitting around, floppy disks sitting around with good (8)___ on them, documents they might need. If they do, you may want to work on migrating them over to another type of (9)__ medium as quickly as possible because it’s becoming more and more difficult to even find (10)___ disk drives out there in the wild with these new machines.

III Watch the video. Choose the correct option to complete the sentences.

When we think about input/storage on almost all machines today it’s magnetic drives/hard drives. It’s hard disk drive that people are using to store/protect data. Hard disk drives come in some pretty standard shapes/formats. The drives that you’ll see inside of the machine are these 3.5/4.5 inch drives that you might see. There are three different kinds of drives that are you might see inside of your machine, these happen to be different formats: there is a CATA/SATA drive which is here on the top, there is a PATA drive here in the middle, at the bottom is this SCSI which isn’t necessarily mentioned on the latest version of the CompTIA + certification  requirements, but I have this picture anyway. I thought I’ll show you the differences between these devices/interfaces and all three. And so that’s one way you can look at a drive and see what kind of drive it is but notice all are of the same shape/size so I could put them into the same type of structure inside of my computer, they’ll fit inside exactly the same rack/slot even if it’s SATA or PATA or SCSI doesn’t matter. They’ll still fit in the same form factor. These drives themselves and their interfaces/capacity do look a little bit differently and they were completely different between these different drive types even though they use exactly the same form factor. The SATA drive, the PATA drive and the SCSI drives have completely different technologies that are used on the drive and on the disc drive/motherboard or drive controller of your system. So you can’t switch/swap out a PATA for a SATA and vice versa, they’re very different drives in their technology and how they work. The latest technologies of drives went into something called ‘solid-state drives’/ ‘solo-state drive’ where you don’t have these moving/movie parts, these plates/platters that would spin and arms/hands that would come out and read data like an old record player. Instead our latest kind of drives are these memory only drives, the type of information there, there’s no moving parts whatsoever, it’s all solid state technology, it’s all memory chips/slots and the testers/controllers that read the data from memory.  And because of that they’re very very fast methods of storing data and writing/retrieving data but they’re also very expensive when you compare it on a per gigabyte basis. There might be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars to buy an SSD flash drive/drive where I could spend exactly the same amount of money for a traditional hard drive and have ten times the capacity/space available on the system. So you’ll see the prices of SSD drives will drop as time goes on, eventually we may move everything over to SSD drives. But in the meantime we’ve got a choice we could buy machines that have SSD drives that are cheap/expensive and don’t have a lot of space or we have the traditional/trading hard drives which have a lot of space on them are not quite as expensive but slower/faster technologies in the way that they work.

Let’s look inside a disk/motherboard, a hard drive itself, and look at the geometry inside of it and see how these things are really made up. Hard drives themselves have a lot of different particles/components to them. This platter/actuator that’s here is something that just spins, isn’t floppy/magnetic type technology that’s used to store data back and forth on this platter. And normally you don’t see it like this, normally it is contained all within a single place, there’s a cover that goes over the top and there’s a very filtered air/wind flow that goes between all of the system so no dust or anything can get inside of this environment because that platter has on top of it this spike/spindle that’s spinning/swirling around and there’s not a lot of room between the hand/head that’s on their  platter reading the data. Dust/dirt and anything that gets in their can create a problem with reading, so it’s a very clean environment inside of your hard drive. Once you take the lid/top off - hard drive’s no good anymore. And it spins at different speeds: 54/64 hundred revolutions per minute or seventy two hundred resolutions/revolutions per minute or even 10000/1000 revolutions per minute,  different drives spin at different rates, generally the faster it spins the faster the access of the data is going to be. What you have also on the drive is something called an actuator. This is in charge of moving this arm up and down/back and forth across the dry platter/actuator itself so that you can access data. That arm at the end of it has a head and that head is what is responsible for reading these modified/magnetic ones and zeros that are being written on to this platter. And so the platter’s spinning and the actuator’s causing the arm to go back and forth and back and forth to read that text/data all the time. You can see now why a solid state drive, where you’re immediately accessing/assess data, would naturally be a lot faster. But this hard drive technology has been around for so long, it’s incredibly revealing/reliable and it is able to store so much information in such a small place that’s really the primary form of data storage/ data input that we have on our computers today. 

IV Watch the video. Write the words you hear to complete the sentences.

Here’s a close-up version of that 1)_____. You can see it looks like a 2)____ is really sitting right on top of the platter and if the platter isn’t spinning, that’s really what it’s doing, it’s a very small bit of air that’s sitting just above that spinning drive 3)____ where the head just kind of floats there and is able to read the drive itself. So you’re dealing with very precise measurements, very precise technology. That’s why whenever you’re working with a 4)____ or working with the computer you don’t want to 5)____ that computer around a lot because your head can hit up against the top of that drive, on top of the platter, and really create 6)_____. Notice there are heads not only on the top, but there’re also heads and arms to go underneath too so you can access multiple columns, multiple cylinders we call it, of the drive 7)_____. Just a faster way to read data, if I have multiple heads across multiple platters, is to read all at the same time and I can access the data that much 8)____. Whenever you start looking at the way its drive is laid out,  you’re going to see a lot of different names 9)____ with the way the drive is configured. And what I’m looking at here is a drive where I’m just drawing a line across the drive to give you feel that these are the 10)____ within the drive itself.  Obviously the tracks are very small these are mini mini  mini tracks on a single drive on a top of a 11)_____ on a single side of a platter. And I’m just giving you an example here of what the track might look like. There are four 12)____ I’ve laid out here. Obviously there are many many more ‘cause we’re dealing with very very small amounts.

Now if we look all the way through here if we were to take a head and push it all the way through this or take that track and see it all the way through this, each platter that would be a 13)____. So all of the arms within the hard drive are all around the same cylinder at the same time. So if you need data from the top platter you’ve got to move the 14)____ over, but if you need data from another platter in another tracked the arm’s going to have to 15)  ____    _____. And so your hard drive has to keep track of where all the data is and know how to 16)____ all of that.  That’s really up to the speed of that arm and the 17)_____ of that platter going back to determine how quickly you can get to that data.

V Mark the following statements as True or False

1.    FDDs are no longer widely used.

2.    FDDs have the capacity of 1.54 gigabytes.

3.    You can swap SATA drive for a PATA drive, they have the same interface.

4.    Not every drive can fit into your computer as they are all of different size.

5.    Hard drives are much faster than solid-state drives.

6.    Solid-state drives are expensive because you pay for their physical measurements.

7.    Hard drives are like old record players, they consist of platters that spin and arms that read data.

8.    It’s always better to buy an SSD drive.

9.    You can easily take the top off hard drive; it would not influence the drive.

10.Revolutions per minute are the speed at which you can access data.

11.If you hit or shake the hard drive while it’s spinning, you may break it.

VI Answer the Questions

1.    What types of storage devices do you know?

2.    What types of hard drives do you know? What are the differences between them?

3.    What technology is solid state drive based on?

4.    What advantages and disadvantages do hard drives and solid state drives have?

5.    How does hard drive work?

6.    What does the speed of data access depend on?