Glossary

A D A P T E R An adapter enables the system to access peripheral devices by converting the protocol of one bus or interface to another. An adapter may also provide specialized function. For example, a RAID controller is a type of adapter that provides RAID functions. Adapters may reside on the system board or be an add-in card. Other examples of adapters include network and SCSI adapters.

A H C I — A programming specification which defines the operation of Serial ATA host controllers (also known as host bus adapters) in a non-implementation-specific manner. The specification describes a system memory structure for computer hardware vendors to exchange data between host system memory and attached storage-devices.

ATA (A D V A N C E D TE C H N O L O G Y A T T A C H M E N T ) — A standard interface for connecting a system’s storage devices, such as CD-ROMs and hard-drives.

ATAPI (ATA P A C K E T I N T E R F A C E ) — An interface standard that defines the packet protocol between a system and its internal storage peripherals, such as CD-ROM, DVD, or tape drives. ATAPI provides the command set for controlling the devices via an IDE interface.

B A C K G R O U N D I N I T I A L I Z A T I O N Background initialization is the automatic check for media errors on physical disks. It ensures that striped data segments are the same on all physical disks in a virtual disk. The difference between a background initialization and a consistency check is that a background initialization is automatic for new virtual disks. The operation starts automatically after you create the disk.

BAS (B A C K G R O U N D A R R A Y S C A N ) — Background Array Scan is a background operation which gets executed every 100msec. that verifies and corrects the mirror, volume or parity data for virtual disks. BAS starts automatically after a Virtual Disk is created.

BIOS (B A S I C I N P U T /O U T P U T S YS T E M ) C O N F I G U R A T I O N U T I L I T Y An alternate name for the PERC Virtual Disk Management utility. The utility appears during system startup when <Ctrl><R> are pressed.

C A C H E Fast memory that holds recently accessed data. Using cache speeds subsequent access to the same data. It is most often applied to processor-memory access but also can be used to store a copy of data accessible over a network. When data is read from or written to main memory, a copy is also saved in cache memory with the associated main memory address. The cache memory software monitors the addresses of subsequent reads to see if the required data is already stored in cache memory. If it is already in cache memory (a cache hit), it is read from cache memory

Glossary

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