Review of Essential Terms and Concepts

1. State Amdahl's Law in words.

2. What is speedup?

3. What is a protocol, and why is it important in I/O bus technology?

4. Name three types of durable storage.

5. Explain how programmed I/O is different from interrupt-driven I/O.

6. What is polling?

7. How are address vectors used in interrupt-driven I/O?

8. How does direct memory access (DMA) work?

9. What is a bus master?

10. Why does DMA require cycle stealing?

11. What does it mean when someone refers to I/O as bursty?

12. How is channel I/O different from interrupt-driven I/O?

13. How is channel I/O similar to DMA?

14. What is multiplexing?

15. What distinguishes an asynchronous bus from a synchronous bus?

16. What is settle time, and what can be done about it?

17. Why are magnetic disks called direct access devices?

18. Explain the relationship among disk platters, tracks, sectors, and clusters.

19. What are the major physical components of a rigid disk drive?

20. What is zoned-bit recording?

21. What is seek time?

22. What is the sum of rotational delay and seek time called?

23. What is a file allocation table (FAT), and where is it found on a floppy disk?

24. By what order of magnitude does a rigid disk rotate more than a flexible disk?

25. What is the name for robotic optical disk library devices?

26. What is the acronym for computer output that is written directly to optical media rather than paper or microfiche?

27. Magnetic disks store bytes by changing the polarity of a magnetic medium. How do optical disks store bytes?

28. How is the format of a CD that stores music different from the format of a CD that stores data? How are the formats alike?

29. Why are CDs especially useful for long-term data storage?

30. Do CDs that store data use recording sessions?

31. How do DVDs store so much more data than regular CDs?

32. Name the three methods for recording WORM disks.

33. Why is magnetic tape a popular storage medium?

34. Explain how serpentine recording differs from helical scan recording.

35. What are two popular tape formats that use serpentine recording?

36. Which RAID levels offer the best performance?

37. Which RAID levels offer the best economy while providing adequate redundancy?

38. Which RAID level uses a mirror (shadow) set?

39. What are hybrid RAID systems?

40. Who was the founder of the science of information theory?

41. What is information entropy and how does it relate to information redundancy?

42. Name an advantage and a disadvantage of statistical coding.

43. Name two types of statistical coding.

44. The LZ77 compression algorithm falls into which class of data compression algorithms?