Dell H200 manual Glossary

Glossary

This section defines or identifies technical terms, abbreviations, and acronyms used in this document.

A

Adapter

An adapter enables the computer system to access peripheral devices by converting the protocol of one bus or interface to another. An adapter may also provide specialized function. Adapters may reside on the system board or be an add-in card. Other examples of adapters include network and SCSI adapters.

B

BIOS

(Basic Input/Output System) The part of the operating system in a system that provides the lowest level interface to peripheral devices. BIOS also refers to the Basic Input/Input Output System of other “intelligent” devices, such as RAID controllers.

BIOS Configuration Utility

The BIOS Configuration Utility reports and enables the configuration of controller properties. The utility resides in the controller BIOS and its operation is independent of the operating systems on your system. The BIOS Configuration Utility, also known as Ctrl-C, is built on elements called controls. Each control performs a function.

C

Coercion

Coercion is the process of rounding down the number of Logical blocks used for the physical members of a virtual disk to a common number. This allows drives with different absolute capacities, which can vary between drive manufacturers and drive families, to share a common stripe size and count as members of the virtual disk. Coercion necessarily results in a smaller capacity than was available on the un-coerced basic physical drive.

Glossary

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