Maxtor QUICKVIEW ATA - Manual (Page 59)

Glossary
Maxtor QuickView 400/500GB Serial ATA Hard Disk Drive G-5
CMOS. With an installation program like
Disk Manager, the drive can be redefined to
any logical parameters necessary to adapt to
the system drive tables.
LOOK AHEAD – The technique of
buffering data into cache RAM by reading
subsequent blocks in advance to anticipate
the next request for data. The look ahead
technique speeds up disk access of sequential
blocks of data.
LOW-LEVEL FORMATTING –
Formatting that creates the sectors on the
platter surfaces so the operating system can
access the required areas for generating the
file structure. Maxtor drives are shipped with
the low-level formatting already done.
LOW PROFILE – Describes drives built to
the 3 1/2-inch form factor, which are only 1
inch high.
M
MB – See megabyte.
MEDIA – The magnetic film that is
deposited or coated on an aluminum substrate
which is very flat and in the shape of a disk.
The media is overcoated with a lubricant to
prevent damage to the heads or media during
head take off and landing. The media is
where the data is stored inside the disk in the
form of magnetic flux or polarity changes.
MEGABYTE (Mb) – A unit of
measurement equal to 1,024 kilobytes, or
1,048,576 bytes except when referring to disk
storage capacity.
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes when referring to
disk storage capacity.
See also kilobyte.
MEGAHERTZ – A measurement of
frequency in millions of cycles per second.
MHz – See megahertz.
MICROPROCESSOR – The integrated
circuit chip that performs the bulk of data
processing and controls the operation of all of
the parts of the system. A disk drive also
contains a microprocessor to handle all of the
internal functions of the drive and to support
the embedded controller.
MICROSECOND (µs) – One millionth of a
second (.000001 sec.).
MILLISECOND (ms) – One thousandth of
a second (.001 sec.).
MTTF – A basic measure of reliability for
non-repairable systems. It is the mean time
expected until the first failure of a piece of
equipment. MTTF is a statistical value and is
meant to be the mean over a long period of
time and large number of units. For constant
failure rate systems, MTTF is the inverse of
the failure rate. If failure rate is in
failures/million hours, MTTF = 1,000,200 /
Failure Rate for components with
exponential distributions.