Ports for storage devices

Computer systems have a variety of secondary storage devices, some essential and the others optional. Some of these include hard-disk drives, optical drives, tape drives, floppy drives, etc.

For the transfer of data to and fro from the devices controllers are required to control the ports for connecting the devices. For the ports already present in the motherboard, usually the controller is on-board the motherboard too. The ports for hard-disk drives and optical drives include:

Parallel ATA (PATA/IDE):

• 40 pin cable and port
• max cable length: 45cm
• max number of hard drives: 4 (only in some motherboards, 2 per cable)
• max transfer speed: 133 MB/s

Serial ATA (SATA):

• 7 pin cable and port
• max cable length: 1m
• max number of hard drives: 8 (till now, one per cable)
• max transfer speed: 150-600 MB/s

SATA ports are fast replacing PATA ports. Controllers for extra ports like additional SATA or PATA ports, SCSI, USB, etc. that have been added via PCI card or similar are built on the PCI card itself.

There are ports for additional storage expansion as well like USB and SCSI. SCSI is mainly used with servers that have large arrays of hard-disk drives whereas USB controller is already present on the motherboard. The latest USB 3.0 specification is supposed to achieve 600 MB/s.

PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect

The PCI refers to the computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. These devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself, called a planar device in the PCI specification, or an expansion card that fits into a PCI slot. ( A,B : ports and sockets of a motherboard )

Typically, PCI cards used in the expansion slots of a PC include network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as USB or SATA, TV tuner and disk controllers.

The common specifications of PCI ports are:

• 32 or 64 bit bus-width
• 33.33 or 66.67 MHz synchronous clock
• transfer rate of 133 MB/s for 32-bit
• 32- or 64-bit memory address space (4 GB or 16 EB)
• 5-volt signaling

Funny USB Drives in Market

Weird Thumb Usb Drive

This one falls in the bizarre category. This goes to show that having a USB pen drive is not cool enough you need a freakingly real looking thumb to grab some attention.

Wanna freak out your friends buy just for $89
[Via fosfor]

USB drive that inflates with Storage

The novelty of a USB disk drive is that it could be 2 GB and yet it is so small. one russian perharps didn't get that. He designed, patented a kind of USB storage that blows up according to the storage space occupied. It uses micropump to achieve that result. So with this if you carry a bunch of files in the USB if feels too like you are carrying a bunch of files in your pocket. What next USB inflatable Bra ?




[Thnx TechLivez]

Freshly Baked USB Drives

Considering most people that use a computer I know, either should be on a diet or on a diet, USB that resembles a burger isn't that good idea especially when delectable looking gadget is $60. For the people who aren't tortured at the sight of nicely baked pizza there is also Hot Dog, French Bread and sandwich.

Gold Ingot Bar USB Hub
Now it is a know fact allegedly that Japanese dig weird USB stuff and one company is just doing that. One of their product is Gold Ingot USB Hub ... phew ! Check out the company Ceo endorsing the product.

5 Tricks With Your USB

Have You Ever Imagined what you can do with your USB Flash Drive except storing and transferring the Data. If the answer is NO, Then I am going to share some simple tricks which you can implement easily and make your working experience with USB much more interesting.

Assign an Icon: - Do you work with multiple flash drives simultaneously and want an easy method to differentiate between two flash drives. Then you should start thinking of assigning different icons to all your flash drives when you plug your drive in PC to make your work easy.

To assign a Custom Icon to Your Flash Drive,

Create a notepad file and rename it to autorun.inf

After that paste the following code in to your autorun.inf file

[autorun]

icon=autorun.ico

Now select the image which you want to use as your icon, Rename it to autorun.ico and paste it in to your flash drive. Plug the flash drive in to pc and your computer would automatically assign icon to your flash drive.

Backup Data: - Automatically take backup of your important Data in to your Flash Drive Every time you leave your computer. You can use a free tool called SyncBackSE to do this for you. You can download free version of this tool here .

Install SyncBackSE on your Computer and insert your Flash Drive which is F: in my case. Then create folders in your Flash Drive as shown in picture , you can name folders according to your choice

Now you have to select source folder of which you want to take backup and destination folder in your USB Drive where you want to store your backup as in following picture.

SyncBackSE gives you the option to select subdirectories so that you can select your important folders easily. After that hit the Misc Tab and schedule your back up. Also you can set daily email notifications so that you can know whether backup are completing successfully or not.

Boot Separate Operating System:- You can Boot a separate standalone operating system from your flash drive. You can download a free utility Damn Small Linux which is small standalone Linux operating system and will run inside Windows. If you want to Run Windows operating system from your flash drive then you can download Mojopack ($50/license) free trial.

Convert USB TO Mp3 Player: - Convert Your USB In to Portable Media Player by downloading and installing free Portable VLC Player to it. Copy your favorite songs to your Flash Drive. Just plug your drive in to any PC and Start Listening.

Encrypt Your USB Drive: - Save Important Data in your Drive in case it gets lost. Encrypt all your important data by using a free utility TrueCrypt .

After Installing, Select the file in your USB Drive which you want to Encrypt and then Hit Create Volume Button as shown in figure.

After that select Encryption Algorithm you want to use and then hit Next. TrueCrypt will ask you to enter a password which you will need to restore the encrypted file.

TrueCrypt will create a separate Encrypted volume which will contain all your sensitive Data

To Restore Your Encrypted Files select the volume you want to restore and then Hit Mount Button. Enter the Volume Password you created above and if the password is correct the select volume would be mounted and a virtual hard drive would be created to use. Once you are done with the mounted volume select Dismount All and the volume would be dismounted and encrypted again

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Ways to prevent your PEN drive from VIRUS

*Now go to Start--> Run and type cmd to open the Command Prompt window .

*Now go to My Computer and Check the Drive letter of your USB drive or Pen Drive.
( E.g. If it is written Kingston (I), then I: will be the drive letter .)

*In the Command Window ( cmd ) , type the drive letter: and Hit Enter .

*Now type dir/w/o/a/p and Hit Enter

*You will get a list of files . In the list , search if anyone of the following do exist

1. Autorun.inf

2. New Folder.exe

3. Bha.vbs

4. Iexplore.vbs

5. Info.exe
6. New_Folder.exe

7. Ravmon.exe
8. RVHost.exe or any other files with .exe Extension .

If you find any one of the files above , Run the command attrib -h -r -s -a *.* and Hit Enter.

Now Delete each File using the following Command del filename ( E.g del autorun.inf ) .