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GLOSSARY
speed, switched architecture. Each PCI Express link is a serial commu-
nications channel made up of two differential wire pairs that provide
2.5 Gbits/sec in each direction. Up to 32 channels may be combined,
creating a parallel interface of independently controlled serial links.
PCI-X
(PCI extended) an enhanced PCI bus technology is backward compat-
ible with existing PCI cards. PCI and PCI-X slots are physically the
same. PCI cards run in PCI-X slots, and PCI-X cards run in PCI slots at
the slower PCI rates. First introduced in 1999, PCI-X offered increased
speed over PCI and has steadily increased to more than 30 times that
of the original PCI bus.
RAID
(Redundant Array of Independent Disks) a disk subsystem that is used
to increase performance or provide fault tolerance. RAID can also be
set up to provide both functions at the same time. RAID is a set of
two or more ordinary hard disks and a specialized disk controller that
contains the RAID functionality. RAID has been developed initially for
servers and stand-alone disk storage systems. RAID is important espe-
cially when rebuilding data after a disk failure.
Rebuild
When a RAID array enters into a degraded mode, it is advisable to
rebuild the array and return it to its original conguration (in terms of
the number and state of working disks) to ensure against operation in
degraded mode.
SATA (Serial ATA)
The evolution of the ATA (IDE) interface that changes the physical
architecture from parallel to serial and from master-slave to point-
to-point. Unlike parallel ATA interfaces that connect two drives; one
congured as master, the other as slave, each Serial ATA drive is con-
nected to its own interface. At initial introduction, Serial ATA (SATA)
increases the transfer rate to 150 MB/sec (1.5Gb/s) and SATA2 to 300
MB/sec.