Multimedia Devices and Mass Storage

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Chapter 11

• Multimedia Devices and Mass Storage

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You Will Learn

• About multimedia devices such as sound cards,
  digital cameras, and MP3 players
• About optical storage technologies such as CD and
  DVD
• How certain hardware devices are used for backups
  and fault tolerance
• How to troubleshoot multimedia and mass storage
  devices

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Multimedia on a PC

• Goal
• To create or reproduce lifelike representations
  of sight and sound
• Challenge
• Data storage is digital
• Sights and sounds are analog

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CPU Technologies for Multimedia

• MMX (Multimedia Extensions)
• Used by Pentium MMX and Pentium II
• SSE (Streaming SIMD Extension)
• Used by the Pentium III
• SSE2
• For the Pentium 4 (which can also use MMX and SSE)

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Multimedia Devices

• Sound cards
• Digital cameras
• MP3 players
• Video capture cards

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Sound Cards

• Have ports for external stereo speakers and
  microphone input
• May be Sound-blaster compatible
• Sampling accuracy is critical to performance
• Stages of computerized sound
• Convert from analog to digital (digitize)
• Store digital data in compressed data file
• Reproduce or synthesize sound (digital to analog)

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Installing a Sound Card

• Process
• Physically install card in empty PCI slot on the
  motherboard
• Install sound card driver
• Install sound applications software
• Special considerations for Windows 2000/XP
  installations

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Installing a Sound Card (continued)
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Installing a Sound Card (continued)
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Digital Cameras

• Scan field of image and translate light signals
  into digital values
• Use TWAIN format for transferring images

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A Flash RAM Card
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MP3 Players

• Devices that play MP3 files
• MP3 can reduce size of a sound file as much as
  124 without much loss in quality

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A Typical MP3 Player
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Compression Methods Used with MP3 Players

• MPEG-1 standard
• Image compression for business/home applications
• MPEG-2 standard
• Video film compression on DVD-ROM
• MPEG-3 standard
• Audio compression
• MPEG-4 standard
• Video transmissions over the Internet

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How MP3 Players Work

• Play MP3 files
• Downloaded from a PC
• Directly from Internet (streaming audio)
• Convert files from music CDs into MP3 files
  (ripping)

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Video Capture Card

• Captures input from camcorder or directly from TV
• Features to look for
• IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port to interface with
  digital camcorder
• Data transfer rates
• Capture resolution and color-depth capabilities
• Ability to transfer data back to digital
  camcorder or VCR
• Stereo audio jacks
• Video-editing software

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Optical Storage Technology

• Patterns of tiny pits on disc surface represent
  bits, which are readable by a laser beam
• Major optical storage technologies
• CD-ROM drives
• Use CDFS (Compact Disc File System) or UDF
  (Universal Disk Format)
• DVD drives
• Use only UDF

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CDs

• Read-only data physically embedded into disc
  surface
• Store data as pits and lands
• Use constant linear velocity (CLV) and constant
  angular velocity (CAV)
• Look for multisession feature
• Use precautions when handling

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Layout of Sectors on a CD
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How a CD Drive Can Interface with the Motherboard

• EIDE interface (most common)
• SCSI interface with SCSI host adapter
• Portable drive plug into external port on PC

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Installing a CD Drive
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CD-R and CD-RW

• CD-R (CD-recordable)
• Enables burning your own CDs
• Cannot edit or overwrite
• Bottom of disk is tinted (eg, blue, black) CDs
  are silver
• Inexpensive
• Can be read by all CD-ROM drives
• CD-RW (CD-rewritable)
• Allows overwriting old data with new data
• Cannot always be read by older drives

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DVD (Digital Video Disc)

• Has large storage capacity (8.5 GB one side 17
  GB both sides)
• Uses UDF file system
• Uses MPEG-2 video compression requires MPEG-2
  controller to decode compressed data
• Stores audio in Dolby AC-2 compression
• Recently HD-DVD and read-writable DVDs

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DVD Drive
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DVD Devices
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Installing a DVD Drive
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Installing a DVD Drive (continued)
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Installing a DVD Drive (continued)
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Installing a DVD Drive (continued)
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Installing a DVD Drive (continued)
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Installing a DVD Drive (continued)
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Hardware Used for Backups and Fault Tolerance

• On standalone PCs or small servers
• Tapes
• Removable drives
• On a PC connected to file server
• Back up data to a file server

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Tape Drives

• Advantages
• Inexpensive and convenient
• Large capacity
• Several types and formats
• Disadvantage
• Sequential access

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Tape Drives (continued)
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How a Tape Drive Interfaces with a Computer

• External
• Parallel port with optional pass-through to
  printer
• Internal
• IDE ATAPI interface
• External or internal
• SCSI bus
• USB connection, its own proprietary controller
  card, or floppy drive interface

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External Tape Drive Using a Parallel Port
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An ATAPI Tape Drive
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Tapes Used by a Tape Drive

• Kinds of tapes
• Full-sized data cartridges
• Minicartridges (most popular)
• Match tapes to tape drives several standards and
  sizes exist

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Minicartridge
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Removable Drives

• Can be internal or external
• Advantages
• Increase overall storage capacity
• Easy to move large files between computers
• Convenient medium for making backups
• Easy to secure important files
• Considerations when purchasing
• Drop height
• Half-life of the disk

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Types of Removable Drives

• Newer
• IBM Microdrive
• JumpDrive by Lexar Media
• Iomega HDD drive by Iomega
• Older
• Iomega 3½-inch Zip drive
• SuperDisk by Imation

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IBM Microdrive
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JumpDrive
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Iomega HDD Drive
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Zip Drives
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Installing a Removable Drive

• Internal removable drive
• Similar to installing a hard drive
• For an EIDE drive, set the drive to master or
  slave on an IDE channel
• External removable drive
• Different process
• If a SCSI drive, SCSI host adapter must already
  be installed and configured

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Fault Tolerance, Dynamic Volumes, and RAID

• Fault tolerance
• Computers ability to respond to a fault or
  catastrophe
• Dynamic volumes
• Hard drive configuration that improves
  performance by implementing fault tolerance and
  writing data across multiple drives
• RAID (redundant array of independent disks)
• Methods used to improve performance and
  automatically recover from a failure

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Dynamic Volumes under Windows

• Basic disks and dynamic disks
• Types of dynamic volumes
• Simple volume
• Spanned volume
• Striped volume (RAID 0)
• Mirrored volume (RAID 1)
• RAID-5 volume

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Basic Disks and Dynamic Disks
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Windows Support for RAID
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Ways Hardware Can Support a RAID Array

• Motherboard IDE controller supports RAID
• Install a RAID-compliant IDE controller card and
  disable IDE controller on motherboard
• Motherboard SCSI controller supports RAID, or
  install a SCSI host adapter that supports RAID

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Hardware RAID
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Troubleshooting Guidelines

• Problems with CD, CD-RW, DVD, or DVD-RW
  installation
• Troubleshooting sound problems
• Troubleshooting tape drives
• Minicartridge does not work
• Data transfer is slow
• Drive does not work after installation
• Drive fails intermittently or gives errors

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Summary

• Multimedia devices
• What they can do
• How they work
• How to support them
• Storage devices installation and troubleshooting
• CDs
• DVDs
• Removable drives
• Tape drives