Glossary 81
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 onthe system board or be an
add-in card. Other examples of adapters include network and SCSIadapters.

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.
PERC H200.book Page 81 Tuesday, July 13, 2010 4:15 PM