E X P A N S I O N B U S to communicate

Your system contains an expansion bus that allows the processor with controllers for peripherals, such as NICs.

E X P A N S I O N C A R D An add-in card, such as a NIC or SCSI adapter, that plugs into an expansion-card connector on the system board. An expansion card adds some specialized function to the system by providing an interface between the expansion bus and a peripheral.

E X P A N S I O N - C A R D C O N N E C T O R A connector on the system board or riser board for plugging in an expansion card.

F — Fahrenheit.

FAT — File allocation table. The file system structure used by MS-DOS to organize and keep track of file storage. The Microsoft® Windows® operating systems can optionally use a FAT file system structure.

F L A S H M E M O R Y A type of EEPROM chip that can be reprogrammed from a utility on diskette while still installed in a system; most EEPROM chips can only be rewritten with special programming equipment.

F O R M A T To prepare a hard drive or diskette for storing files. An unconditional format deletes all data stored on the disk.

FSB — Front-side bus. The FSB is the data path and physical interface between the processor and the main memory (RAM).

F T Feet.

FTP — File transfer protocol.

G Gram(s).

G — Gravities.

G B Gigabit(s); 1024 megabits or 1,073,741,824 bits.

GB — Gigabyte(s); 1024 megabytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes. However, when referring to hard-drive capacity, the term is usually rounded to 1,000,000,000 bytes.

G R A P H I C S M O D E A video mode that can be defined as x horizontal by y vertical pixels by z colors.

G R O U P As it relates to DMI, a group is a data structure that defines common information, or attributes, about a manageable component.

G U A R D I N G A type of data redundancy in which a set of physical drives stores data and an additional drive stores parity data. See also mirroring, striping, and RAID.

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Glossary

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