Owner's manual

Glossary 71
SCSIport
SCSIport driver is a Microsoft
®
driver for Windows
®
XP storage architecture,
delivering SCSI commands to the storage targets. The SCSIport driver works
well with storage using parallel SCSI.
Serial Architecture
Serial architectures have emerged to deliver higher performance by allowing
more bandwidth per device pathway than their parallel counterparts.
Serial architecture connections consist of a single pair of transmission signals
that contain an embedded clock for self-clocking, enabling clock speed to be
easily scaled. Serial bus architectures also support a network of dedicated
point-to-point device connections, versus the multi-drop architectures of
parallel buses, 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.
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