After reviewing the lectures on computer and network components, explore your personal or professional environment for computer or network components encountered daily. Provide a brief summary of all the components you have found, then select one in particular that is new or unfamiliar to you and describe its purpose in more detail.
In this day and age almost everything I do in a day involves some sort of technology. I wake up to the alarm I set on my iPhone 6 that has a touch screen and then perusing social media and emails for a couple minutes after that. I use my Keurig to make coffee in the morning, watching a show or two while getting ready for work on our Play Station that is connected to the internet via a Netgear router, and adjust the temperature and volume for the radio in my car on my way to the hospital. As a radiation therapist I am surrounded by computer monitors, cables, keyboards, mouses, Aria software, Epic, a Truebeam console, Microsoft Word documents, PACS, TPS, R&V, pagers, and phones, just to name a few. After work I return home to complete weekly discussions, quizzes, and readings on my MacBook. It never ceases to amaze me just how much technology we really encounter every day.
Although I feel pretty confident about understanding of the basics of most the computer and network components that I use, I know very little about storage in computers. There are two main types of storage that are fixed devices or rather devices that are permanently part of the computer; spinning disk drives and solid state drives (SSD).[1] An SSD doesn’t have any moving parts which differs from the spinning disk drives in that, as indicated in the name, it has disks made of metal or ceramic that spin and are coated with a material that can change between magnetized and demagnetized states rapidly with the use of a component called a read/write head.[1] They are both able to store massive amounts of data, but they both have their pros and cons. Since spinning disk drives have so many moving parts they are susceptible to damage from getting hit or dropped and since they use a magnetized coating they can be damaged if they are placed too close to magnets, but they are very cheap to make.[1] Solid state drives are non-volatile meaning that the data stored will be kept when the device is turned off and since they don’t have any moving parts they are less likely to be damaged from movement, but they are much more costly in comparison to spinning disk drives.[1]
Reference:
Although I feel pretty confident about understanding of the basics of most the computer and network components that I use, I know very little about storage in computers. There are two main types of storage that are fixed devices or rather devices that are permanently part of the computer; spinning disk drives and solid state drives (SSD).[1] An SSD doesn’t have any moving parts which differs from the spinning disk drives in that, as indicated in the name, it has disks made of metal or ceramic that spin and are coated with a material that can change between magnetized and demagnetized states rapidly with the use of a component called a read/write head.[1] They are both able to store massive amounts of data, but they both have their pros and cons. Since spinning disk drives have so many moving parts they are susceptible to damage from getting hit or dropped and since they use a magnetized coating they can be damaged if they are placed too close to magnets, but they are very cheap to make.[1] Solid state drives are non-volatile meaning that the data stored will be kept when the device is turned off and since they don’t have any moving parts they are less likely to be damaged from movement, but they are much more costly in comparison to spinning disk drives.[1]
Reference:
- MacLennan G. Hardware. Lecture presented: University of Wisconsin La Crosse; October 25, 2016