Glossary 59
to deliver full bandwidth to each device, eliminate the
need for bus arbitration, reduce latency, and greatly
simplify hot-plug and hot-swap system
implementations.
Serial Technology
Serial storage technology, specifically Serial ATA,
Serial-Attached SCSI and PCI Express, address the
architectural limitations of their parallel counterparts
to deliver highly scalable performance. The
technology draws its name from the way it transmits
signals - in a single stream, or serially, compared to
multiple streams for parallel. The main advantage of
serial technology is that while it moves data in a single
stream, it wraps data bits into individual packets that
are transferred up to 30 times faster than parallel
technology data.
SMART
Acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting
Technology. The self-monitoring analysis and
reporting technology (SMART) feature monitors the
internal performance of all motors, heads, and drive
electronics to detect predictable drive failures. This
feature helps monitor drive performance and
reliability, and protects the data on the drive. When
problems are detected on a drive, you can replace
or repair the drive without losing any data.
SMART-compliant disks have attributes for which
data (values) can be monitored to identify changes in
values and determine whether the values are within
threshold limits. Many mechanical failures and some
electrical failures display some degradation in
performance before failure.
Storport
The Storport driver has been designed to replace
SCSIport and work with Windows 2003 and beyond.
In addition, it offers better performance for storage
controllers, providing higher I/O throughput rates,
improved manageability, and an upgraded miniport
interface.
Stripe Element
A stripe element is the portion of a stripe that resides
on a single physical disk.
Striping
Disk striping writes data across all physical disks in a
virtual disk. Each stripe consists of consecutive virtual
disk data addresses that are mapped in fixed-size
units to each physical disk in the virtual disk using a
sequential pattern. For example, if the virtual disk
includes five physical disks, the stripe writes data to
physical disks one through five without repeating any
of the physical disks. The amount of space consumed
by a stripe is the same on each physical disk. The
portion of a stripe that resides on a physical disk is a
stripe element. Striping by itself does not provide
data redundancy. Striping in combination with parity
does provide data redundancy.
W
Windows
Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial
operating environments for computers. It provides a
graphical user interface (GUI) to access programs and
data on the computer.
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