Computing Hardware

Input Devices

Hardware that allows data to be entered into a computer system e.g Keyboard, mouse

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Output Devices

Hardware that allows data to be output from a computer system e.g. Monitor, printer

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Secondary Storage Types

Magnetic - Hard disk Optical - CD, DVD, BlueRay Solid State - No moving parts, USB, External hard disk

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Secondary Storage

Non-volatile method for storing large amounts of data for long term use e.g. Hard disk, USB, SD card, Micro SD

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Secondary Storage - Durability

How tough the storage is, how easy it is to damage e.g. CD's can be scratched, Hard disk's are more durable

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Secondary Storage - Portability

How easy it is to move it e.g. CD's are easy to carry around, USB's are lighter. Hard disk's are heavy and inside the computer

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Secondary Storage - Reliability

Does the hardware work or does it break down easily. Can you rely on it

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Secondary Storage - Sizes

Magnet hard disks - large, capacity (GB/TB) Optical disks - (CD/DVD) holds large programs, videos, relatively slow but inexpensive 700mb (CD) 4.7GB(DVD) Flash (Solid-State) - Relatively inexpensive and good access times, can hold many GB of data

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Cache Memory

Volatile memory located as part of the CPU chip. Generally holds less data than RAM. It's very fast but manufacturing costs more than RAM.

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ROM

Non volatile. Holds the boot up program used when the computer first starts

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RAM

Volatile memory. Holds the most recent instructions that have been processed. Lack or RAM is a likely cause of performance issues.

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CPU

Processes instructions. Uses a fetch - decode - execute cycle

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Flash Memory

Solid-State memory used as low cost secondary storage in portable devices and as removable memory e.g. USB, SD card, Micro SD

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Cores

Dual core - This means two processing units in the CPU. Quad core - Four processing units in the CPU

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Clock Speed

Speed of the processor e.g. 4GHZ - this means the CPU can process 4 billion instructions per cycle/second

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Virtual Memory

An area on the hard disk used as memory. Used when the RAM is too small to deal with the amount of instructions. Effects the performance

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De Facto Standards

Standards that just develop by common use. They become the standard way of doing things e.g QWERTY keyboards, programmers using comments

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Open Standards

Standards that are publicly available. Open source software is open to everyone, experts can use and change it, no one is to blame if things go wrong e.g. Android, Linux

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Failover

Software keeps an eye on the health of systems. If it detects a problem it may switch over to another working system (mirror system) and keeps the system runnning

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Redundancy

Keeping a spare piece(s) of hardware in case one breaks. Making sure there is no system down time (or very little)

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Computer System IPOS

Anything that has a input, output device, processor and storage device

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Reliability

How reliable systems are - Unreliable systems may have legal impact, aircraft accidents, loss of data, loss of use of systems impacting on business

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Disaster Recovery

Planning what to do if there is a disaster (fire, flood, natural disaster). Making sure you detect, correct and prevent problems by backups, spare hardware, failover, backup power

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Down Time

When a computer system isn't running, the system is down. It is important to reduce the amount the system is down especially when we rely on them so much

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Computing Hardware

Other cards in this set

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Card 3

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Card 4

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Card 5

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Other cards in this set

Card 2

Front

Back

Card 3

Front

Back

Card 4

Front

Back

Card 5

Front

Back

Comments

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Similar Computing resources: