Parallel ATA (PATA), originally AT Attachment, also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles.
The Tandy 1000 is the first in a line of IBM PC compatible home computer systems produced by the Tandy Corporation for sale in its Radio Shack and Radio Shack Computer Center chains of stores. Introduced in 1984, the product line was aimed at providing affordable but capable systems for home computing or education, with some of its Tandy specific features like graphics, sound and joystick port making it more appealing for home use.
A RAM drive is a block of random-access memory that a computer's software is treating as if the memory were a disk drive. RAM drives provide high-performance temporary storage for demanding tasks and protect non-volatile storage devices from wearing down, since RAM is not prone to wear from writing, unlike non-volatile flash memory. They are in a sense the reverse of virtual memory: RAM drive uses a volatile fast memory as if it's a nonvolatile slow memory. Virtual memory is the opposite.
PC Card is a parallel peripheral interface for laptop computers and PDAs.
The ST-506 and ST-412 were early hard disk drive products introduced by Seagate in 1980 and 1981 respectively, that later became construed as hard disk drive interfaces: the ST-506 disk interface and the ST-412 disk interface. Compared to the ST-506 precursor, the ST-412 implemented a refinement to the seek speed, and increased the drive capacity from 5 MB to 10 MB, but was otherwise highly similar.
The Sharp Zaurus is the name of a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) made by Sharp Corporation. The Zaurus was the most popular PDA during the 1990s in Japan and was based on a proprietary operating system. The first Sharp PDA to use the Linux operating system was the SL-5000D, running the Qtopia-based Embedix Plus. The Linux Documentation Project considers the Zaurus series to be "true Linux PDAs" because their manufacturers install Linux-based operating systems on them by default. The name derives from the common suffix applied to the names of dinosaurs.
CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994.
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures.
Density is a measure of the quantity of information bits that can be stored on a given length of track, area of the surface, or in a given volume of a computer storage medium. Generally, higher density is more desirable, for it allows more data to be stored in the same physical space. Density therefore has a direct relationship to storage capacity of a given medium. Density also generally affects the performance within a particular medium, as well as price.
The Microdrive is a type of miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots.
The Rio Carbon is a line of digital audio players that was produced by the now defunct Rio from 2004 to 2005. It was similar in size, capacity, and cost with Apple's iPod Mini which debuted earlier the same year. This was Rio's second player to use a miniature hard disk for storage, after the Rio Nitrus, which was first to market with a 1.5 GB drive in late 2003.
Input/output operations per second is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). Like benchmarks, IOPS numbers published by storage device manufacturers do not directly relate to real-world application performance.
Dreambox is a series of Linux-powered DVB satellite, terrestrial and cable digital television receivers, produced by German multimedia vendor Dream Multimedia.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
M-Systems Ltd., was a Nasdaq-listed Israeli producer of flash memory storage products founded in 1989 by Dov Moran and Aryeh Mergi, based in Kfar Saba, Israel. They were best known for developing and patenting the first flash drive, marketed in 1995 as DiskOnChip, and the first USB flash drive, marketed in 2000 as DiskOnKey. They also created the patented True Flash Filing System (TrueFFS) which presented the flash memory as a disk drive to the computer. After 17 years of business, they were acquired by their prior competitor, SanDisk, in 2006. The DiskOnChip (DOC) was developed at the R&D Center established by M-Systems called EUROM. Rick Iorillo, Rony Levy and David Deitcher were the individuals that worked on the development and marketing of the first 2 MB DOC. This product went on to receive the Most Innovative Award from EDN in 1995 and later went on to become the Flash Drive and DiskOnKey.
The Seagate Barracuda is a series of hard disk drives and later solid state drives produced by Seagate Technology that was first introduced in 1993.
