TECHNOLOGY REVIEWS
EXOTIC STORAGE
Glossary of PC terms: I
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| IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) | The most popular hard drive interface on the market. Also known as ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) by ANSI. For details go here. |
| ILS (Integrated Leads Suspension) | A new suspension design that reduces the number of moving parts and helps to simplify the manufacturing process without sacrificing performance. |
| Index pulse | A pulse that defines the starting point for each magnetic track and provides initial synchronization for sector addressing. |
| Interleaving | Distributing access order in other fashion than a straight access. Electronics of the older drives was not fast enough to read sectors one after another. Therefore, sector renumbering was introduced creating artificial delays in the stream of incoming data. Interleaving factor 3:1 meant that two sectors will be skipped before reading of the next one. Modern drives have electronics capable of handling the data generated by the drive data stream, making interleaving obsolete. |
| Inductive heads | A type of magnetic head that uses magnetic inductance to sense magnetization of the media and to generate needed magnetization of the media. |
| Internet storage | A new type of off-line data storage where the data is stored on a remote host to free local storage and is accessed via the Internet. |
| Interface | A hardware and/or software data transmission regulator that controls data exchange between the PC and other devices, including such data storage devices as hard disk drives, floppy drives, tape drives, CD drives, DVD drives, etc. The interface is provided by the electronics of the data transfer controller and the drive electronics. There are standards adopted for the interface protocols allowing connection of any standard peripheral device. |
| Iomega drives | A family of removable storage products for data back-up and exchange. The 100 MB Zip drive is the most famous member of this family. The 2 GB Jaz drive is another example. |
| Isochronous Data Transfer | This mode implies uniform in time and provides the guaranteed bandwidth by transferring a uniform amount of data every second. This method is used for, for example, video cameras, where if the error has occurred, it's too late to resend the data again. See also synchronous data transfer and asynchronous data transfer. |
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