Some definitions of these !?

[hulkbuster]

Hello folks, this is my first post here at MSFN , although i have no particular issues to share with you: can anyone provide an easy explanation or definitions of the following terms in easy to understand language, i have googled to know it was more complex to understand few terms such as:

• 
  
• RAID
  
• AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface)
  
• SCSI ADAPTERS
  
• IDE
  
• SATA AND SATA CONTROLLER
  

I come across this term many times when i read any article to slipstream or integrate the Sata controllers to an Xp or Win 2000 disc using nlite.

Edited November 7, 2011 by hulkbuster

[jaclaz]

They are all technical terms.

But nothing actually difficult.

• RAID
  

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk.

*Something* (either software or hardware) that makes more than one disk appear to the OS like a single device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

This has been used either for "speeding up" things (RAID 0), the OS writes to a device, but the actual writing is "divided" onto different hard disks, so that it is faster, or by increasing reliability by using redundancy, data is written at the same time on multiple disks, if one fails, you can get the data from the other one(s) (RAID 1 up to 6).

A "combined approach" is RAID 10 or RAID 1+0.

• AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface)
  

This is a set of (advanced) features a mainboard may have, connected with the usage of SATA hard disks (see below):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

basically a SATA disk on a non AHCI board may not have NCQ (another new term ) i.e. Native Command Queing, which is one of the main things that makes a SATA hard disk "feel" faster.

There are NO exixting hard disks that can take full advantage of the SATA 2.0 allowed data transfer speed (and only a very few can exceed the SATA 1.0 speed), usually a non-NCQ enabled SATA hard disk performs comparably with a ATA 6-PATA/133 disk.

Flash disks like SSD are instead very often above SATA 1.0 and near the limits of SATA 2.0 (and thus SATA 3.0 has been introduced).

• SCSI ADAPTERS
  
• IDE
  
• SATA AND SATA CONTROLLER
  

These are different interfaces or communication protocols.

SCSI is the oldest one, the "brain" of the interface is in the controller and NOT on the disk, it has been for years the fastest possible protocol/type of disk, now becoming obsolete with SATA and SAS (another new world) technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_attached_SCSI

IDE means Integrated Drive Electronics (which you will also find as "ATA" or "ATAPI", this latter only for non-hard-disks, like CD's, tape drives, ZIP disks and the like or PATA) is a parallel interface for disks that have their controller on-board:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA#IDE_and_ATA-1

SATA is the (new, faster) serial version of IDE/ATA :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata

jaclaz