Rectifier (in a PCU)
Converts AC to DC.
P1 connector
The motherboards power port.
Modular PSU
Is a type of power supply where you can attach, or detach individual cables as needed.
Redundant Power Supply
A backup power system.
Heat sink
A block of copper or aluminum with fins.
Is glued to the surface of the CPU with “thermal paste” to protect it from overheating.
Passive cooling
Does not require extra electricity to work.
Non-volatile storage device
Holds data when the system is powered off.
Fixed disk
Is permanently installed inside a computer or device.
Mass storage device
Is a device used to store large amounts of data for long-term use.
Solid state drive (SSD)
Uses flash memory technology to implement persistent mass storage.
PCIe
It is a high speed standard used to connect various hardware components like graphic cards, storage devices, network cards, and other expansion cards to a computer’s motherboard.
NVMe
It is a high-speed storage protocol designed to fully take advantage of the speed of SSDs, especially those that use NAND flash memory.
Works over the PCIe interface.
Hard disk drive (HDD)
Stores data on metal or glass platters that are coated with magnetic substance.
Redundant array of independent disks (RAID)
It is a way to combine multiple hard drives or SSDs into one larger, more efficient storage system.
RAID 0 (striping)
Data is split into chunks and spread across two or more drives.
- Very fast.
x No data redundancy… No backup.
RAID 1 (mirroring)
Every piece of data is duplicated across two or more drives.
- High data safety.
x Storage is halved… If one drive fails, data is still safe on the other.
RAID 5 (striping with parity)
Data is striped (like RAID 0) but with no extra parity info (a sort of “backup” data) distributed across all drives.
- Good balance of speed, capacity, and redundancy.
- Fault tolerance; if one drive fails, the parity data can rebuild the lost data from the remaining disk.
x Requires 3 drives minimum.
Network attached storage (NAS)
An enclosure that can be connected directly to a network rather than a PC.
Flash drive (USB drive, thumb drive, pen drive)
A flash memory board with a USB connector and protective cover.
Optical drive
Compact discs (CDs), digital versatile discs (DVDs), Blu-ray discs (BDs), are mainstream storage formats for music and video retail. All types of optical media use a laser to read the data encoded on the disc surface.
