SYS140_Chapter7_lab

SYS 140 – Chapter 7 Lab Instructions

Instructions: (Follow instructions carefully!)

Your Name goes here

SYS 140

Chapter 7 Lab

Date Goes Here

Objective:

In this lab, you will obtain some additional knowledge on storage technology, and the associated differences. You will need to refer to your journal notes for this assignment.

Questions:

1. Please provide some (at least three) of the details of the disk drive in your computer, and explain what these details mean. You will have to find the disk drive in your computer, and you may have to research that particular model on the Internet. Refer to your notes to pluck out some details about hard drives that you learned. (3 points)

The drive that all the 310 lab computers use is the CT1000MX500SSD4. This solid state drive is made by Crucial and has 1,000 GB of storage capacity. It uses SATA connection to connect to the motherboard and the rest of the computer. It’s max sequential read speed is 560 Mbps.

1. As it refers to hard disk drives: what is a track, cylinder, sector, and cluster? (2 points)

A track is a strip of the platter of a hard drive. It is divided into sectors which store data. A cylinder is a group of tracks that can be found in the same position on each platter of the hard drive. This means if you put a vertical line through the first track and platter it would be above the second track and platter. A sector is just a section on a track of the hard drive. A cluster is just a group of sectors that is on the hard drive.

1. Some disk drives have cache. What is the reason for this? (1 point)

Cache is used on a drive to improve the speed of which you can read and write to the drive. It allows the operating system and programs to access frequent and recent data that is needed for the task the user is doing.

1. Go to Newegg.com and look up some of the internal drives offered by Western Digital. Pick 3 SATA models and describe the specifications of the model you selected. (2 points per model)

   1. What type of drive is it?

      1. Hard Drive

   2. What is the capacity?

      1. 4TB storage capacity

   3. What is the speed?

      1. 7200 RPM

   4. How much cache does the drive have?

      1. 256mg of Cache

2. What is an SSD Drive? What are the advantages of using an SSD Disk Drive? Compare and contrast 2 models from separate manufacturers (one from each of similar size). Make sure you do a feature-to-feature comparison using drives of the same size. (4 points)

An SSD drive is a storage device similar to a hard drive however, it uses DRAM or Flash memory to read and write data without needing moving parts. This makes them a lot faster then traditional hard drives.

Name	Samsung 970 Evo	Western Digital Blue SN570
Storage	500gb	500gb
Write Speed	3200 MBps	2300 MBps
Read Speed	3500 MBps	3500 MBps

Some examples of features are speed, storage capacity (aka size of the drive), etc. Refer to your Notes from the SSD drive video to refresh on features of an SSD drive.

1. There are numerous Personal Cloud Solutions (Dropbox, Google Drive, available to provide various amounts of disk storage to the “world”. Briefly explain the advantages / disadvantages of using cloud storage. Describe two personal cloud solutions after a brief investigation. (4 points)

Cloud storage eliminates the need of maintaining physical storage. Storage in the cloud can be vulnerable for data breaches, and some companies may offer free storage in exchange for using or selling your data for machine learning etc. Two cloud storage solutions are Google Drive and Dropbox. Both allow you to store files on the cloud for very cheap if not free.

1. Briefly describe the difference between SAN and NAS. (1 point)

NAS is a storage solution that utilizes RAID arrays on a network to store data. The device is a network node similar to any other device on the network. SAN is a collection of servers which offers high speed low latency connection. It requires more management and is typically for enterprises. NAS is typically for home networks or less intensive storage. SAN is easier to scale compared to NAS and SANs are typically more expensive. NAS has one point of failure usually which is power, SANs are more resilient to faults which is important for large organizations or companies.

1. Explain fragmentation / defragmentation as it pertains to disk drives. (1 point)

Fragmentation is the process of which a file is split into multiple fragments and can be stored over multiple drives. Defragmentation is the process of which the fragments are called to and then put together to reform the entire file when needed for operation.

Submit your typed lab to the appropriate assignment submission area.