A+ Guide to IT Technical Support, 9th

Edition

Chapter 6
Supporting Hard Drives and Other
Storage Devices
 Objectives

• Discuss technologies used inside a hard drive and

how a computer communicates with a hard drive
• Install and support a hard drive
• Identify tape drives and tape cartridges
• Support optical drives and flash memory devices
• Troubleshoot hard drives

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 Hard Drive Technologies and Interface
Standards
• Hard disk drive (HDD) or hard drive sizes
– 2.5" size for laptop computers
– 3.5" size for desktops
– 1.8" size for low-end laptops, other equipment

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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive
• Solid state drive (SSD) or solid state device (SSD)
– No moving parts
– Built using nonvolatile flash memory stored on
EEPROM (Electronically Erasable Programmable
Read Only Memory) chips
– Memory in an SSD is called NAND flash memory
– Lifespan is based on the number of write operations
to the drive
– Expensive technology, but faster, more reliable, last
longer, and use less power than magnetic drives

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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive
• Magnetic hard drive
– One, two, or more platters, or disks
• Stacked together, spinning in unison inside a sealed
metal housing
– Firmware controls data reading, writing and
motherboard communication
– Read/write heads are controlled by an actuator
– Data is organized in concentric circles, called tracks
• Tracks are divided into segments called sectors
– Most current drives use 4096-byte sectors
• Hybrid hard drives use both technologies
– Operating system must support it
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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive

Figure 6-2 Solid-state drives by Toshiba

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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive

Figure 6-3 Inside a magnetic hard drive

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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive

Figure 6-4 A hard drive is divided into tracks and

sectors; several sectors make one cluster

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Technologies Used Inside a Hard Drive

• Low-level formatting – sector markings are written to

the hard drive at the factory
– Not the same as high-level formatting performed for
Operating System installation
• Firmware, UEFI/BIOS and OS use logical block
addressing (LBA) to address all hard drive sectors
– Size of each sector + total number of sectors
determine drive capacity
• S.M.A.R.T – Self-Monitoring Analysis ad Reporting
Technology
– Used to predict when a drive is likely to fail
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 SATA Interface Standards Used By a
Hard Drive
• All current hard drives use the Serial ATA (SATA)
interface standards to connect to the motherboard
• External hard drive methods
– External SATA (eSATA), FireWire, or USB

Figure 6-5 A SATA cable connects a single SATA drive to a motherboard SATA
connector
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 SATA Interface Standards Used by a
Hard Drive
• Interface standards define data speeds and transfer
methods with a computer system
– Also define types of cables and connectors
• Standards
– Developed by Serial ATA International Organization
(SATA-IO)
– Have the oversight of the T13 Committee

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 SATA Interface Standards Used by a
Hard Drive

Table 6-1 SATA standards

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 SATA Interface Standards Used by a
Hard Drive
• Serial ATA standards are used by all drive types
– Supports hot-swapping (hot-plugging)
• Connect and disconnect drive while system is running
– Connects to one internal SATA connector on the
motherboard via a 7-pin SATA data cable
• Uses a 15-pin SATA power connector
– A motherboard might have two or more SATA
connectors
• Use connectors in the order recommended in the
motherboard user guide

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 SATA Interface Standards Used by a
Hard Drive

Figure 6-6 A SATA data cable and SATA power cable

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 SATA Interface Standards Used by a
Hard Drive
• Motherboard or expansion card can provide external
SATA (eSATA) ports for external drives
• External SATA (eSATA)
– eSATA drives use special external shielded serial
ATA cable up to 2 meters long
• Purchasing considerations
– SATA standards for the drive and motherboard need
to match for optimum speed
– If no match, system runs at the slower speed

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 How to Select and Install Hard Drives

• Topics covered
– Selecting a hard drive
– Installation details for a SATA drive
– How to install hard drive in a bay too wide for drive
– How to set up a RAID system

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 Selecting a Hard Drive

• Hard drive must match OS and motherboard

– Need to know what standards the motherboard or
controller card providing the drive interface can use
– Consult documentation for the board or card
• UEFI/BIOS uses autodetection to prepare the
device
– Drive capacity and configuration selected
– Best possible standard becomes part of configuration

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 Selecting a Hard Drive

• Considerations:
– Drive capacity
• Today’s desktop hard drives range from 1 TB for SSD
to more than 6 TB for magnetic
– Spindle speed
• Most common is 7200 RPM
• The higher the RPMs, the faster the drive
– Interface standard
• Use standards the motherboard supports
– Cache or buffer size
• Ranges from 2 MB to 128 MB
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 Steps to Install a SATA Drive

• A SATA drive might have jumpers

– Most likely set by factory as they should be
• Some SATA drives have two power connectors
– Choose only one to use
– Never install two power cords at the same time
• May have to purchase controller card when the
motherboard drives connectors are not functioning
– Or the if the motherboard does not support a fast
SATA standard that your hard drives uses

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 Steps to Install a SATA Drive

• Step 1: Know your starting point

– How is your system configured?
– Is everything working properly?
– Write down what you know about the system
• Step 2: Read the documentation and prepare your
work area
– Read all installation instructions first
– Visualize all the steps
– Protect against ESD and avoid working on carpet

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 Steps to Install a SATA Drive

• Step 2: Read the documentation and prepare your

work area (cont’d)
– Handle the drive carefully
– Do not touch any exposed circuitry
– Prevent other people from touching exposed
microchips
– Drain static electricity from the package and from your
body by touching metal for at least 2 seconds
– If you must set it down, place it component-side up
– Do not place the drive on the computer case or on a
metal table
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 Steps to Install a SATA Drive

• Step 3: Install the drive

– Shut down the computer and unplug it
– Decide which bay will hold the drive
– Slide drive in the bay and secure it (use two screws
on both sides)
– Use correct motherboard SATA connector
– Connect a 15-pin SATA or 4-pin Molex power
connector from the power supply to the drive
– Check all connections and power up the system
– Verify drive recognized correctly via UEFI/BIOS setup

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 Steps to Install a SATA Drive

• You are ready to prepare the hard drive for first use
– Boot from Windows setup DVD
• Follow directions on the screen to install Windows on
the new drive
– If installing a second hard drive with Windows
installed on first drive use Windows Disk Management
utility to partition and format the second drive

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 Installing a Drive in a Removable Bay

• Unplug the cage fan from its power source

• Turn handle on each locking device
counterclockwise to remove it
• Slide the bay to the front and out of the case
• Insert hard drive in the bay
– Use two screws on each side to anchor the drive in
the bay
• Slide the bay back into the case
• Reinstall the locking pins
• Plug in the cage fan power cord
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 Installing a Drive in a Removable Bay

Figure 6-19 The removable bay has a fan in front and is anchored to the case with locking pins

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 Installing a Drive in a Removable Bay

Figure 6-20 Install the hard drive in the bay using two screws on each side of the drive

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 Installing a Small Drive in a Wide Bay

• Use a universal bay kit to securely fit a small drive

into the bay
• The adapter spans the distance between the sides
of the drive and bay

Figure 6-21 Use the

universal bay kit to make the
drive fit the bay

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 Installing a Hard Drive in a Laptop

• General guidelines:
– See manufacturer’s documentation for drive sizes and
connector types
– Be aware of voiding manufacturer’s warranty
• Considerations when shopping for a laptop drive:
– Laptop drive is 2.5 or 1.8 inches wide
• May use SSD (solid state device) technology
– Hard drives connector: SATA or PATA (older laptops)
– If upgrading, may want to use a USB-to-SATA
converter, so both drives can be working and you can
copy files from one to the other
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 Installing a Hard Drive in a Laptop

• Older laptop computers required disassembly

• Newer notebooks: easy to replace
– If UEFI/BIOS setup uses autodetect:
• System boots up and UEFI/BIOS recognizes new drive
• Searches for an operating system
• If a new drive: boot from Windows recovery CD and
install the OS

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 Setting Up Hardware RAID

• RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)

– Also called: Redundant Array of Independent Disks
– A technology that configures two or more hard drives
to work together as an array of drives
• Why use RAID?
– To improve fault tolerance by writing two copies of it,
each to a different hard drive
– To improve performance by writing data to two or
more hard drives to that a single drive is not
excessively used

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 Types of RAID

• Spanning – sometimes called JBOD (just a bunch of

disks)
– Uses two hard drives to hold a single Windows
volume
– When one drive is full, data is written to second drive
• RAID 0 – uses two or more physical disks
– Writes to physical disks evenly across all disks so that
no one disk receives all activity
– Windows calls RAID 0 a striped volume

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 Types of RAID

• RAID 1: Mirroring
– Duplicates data on one drive to another drive and is
used for fault tolerance (mirrored volume)
• RAID 5: uses three or more drives
– Stripes data across drives and uses parity checking
– Data is not duplicated
• RAID 10: RAID 1+0 (pronounced RAID one zero)
– Combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0
– Takes at least 4 disks
– Data is mirrored across pairs of disks
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 Types of RAID

Figure 6-26 Ways that hard drives can work together

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 Types of RAID

Figure 6-27 RAID 1 and RAID 10

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 How to Implement Hardware RAID

• Hardware implementation
– Hardware RAID controller or RAID controller card
• Motherboard does the work
• Software implementation uses operating system
• Best RAID performance
– All hard drives in an array should be identical in
brand, size, speed, other features
• If Windows is to be installed on a RAID hard drive
– RAID must be implemented before Windows installed

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 How to Implement Hardware RAID

Figure 6-28 RAID controller card provides four SATA internal connectors

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 How to Implement Hardware Raid
• General directions to install RAID 5 array using
three matching SATA drives
– Install drives in the computer case and connect each
to motherboard
– Boot system and enter UEFI/BIOS setup
• Verify drives recognized, select option to configure
SATA, and select RAID
– Reboot the system
• Press Ctrl and I to enter the RAID configuration utility
– Select option 1 to “Create RAID Volume”
• Select RAID 5 (Parity), stripe size value, volume size
• Create volume
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 How to Implement Hardware Raid

Figure 6-30 Configure SATA ports on the motherboard to enable RAID

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 How to Implement Hardware Raid

Figure 6-31 BIOS utility to configure a RAID array

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 How to Implement Hardware Raid

Figure 6-32 Make your choices for the RAID array

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 External Enclosures

• Hard drives are sometimes stored in external

enclosures
– Make it easy to expand storage capacity of a single
computer or make available hard drive storage to an
entire network
• For network attached storage (NAS)
– Enclosure connects to the network via Ethernet port
• Hard drives inside the enclosure might use a SATA
connection

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 External Enclosures

• What to know about supporting external enclosures:

– Enclosure might contain firmware that supports RAID
– To replace a hard drive in an enclosure, see the
documentation for the enclosure
– If a computer case is overheating, remove hard drives
from the case and install them in an external
enclosure
• It is better to leave the hard drive that contains the
Windows installation in the case

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 About Tape Drives

• Tapes drives – an inexpensive way of backing up a

hard drive
• WORM (write once read many) – assures data
written will not be deleted or overwritten
• Disadvantage: data is stored by sequential access
– To read data from anywhere on the tape, you must
start at the beginning of the tape and read until you
find the data you want
– Slow and inconvenient

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 About Tape Drives
• Two kinds of tapes:
– Full-sized data cartridges
– Minicartridges - popular because their drives can fit
into a standard 3-inch drive bay of a PC case
• Common types of tape cartridges:
– DDS (Digital Data Storage)
– LTO (Linear Tape-Open)
– DLT (Digital Linear Tape)
– SDLT (Super Digital Linear Tape)
– Travan

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 About Tape Drives
• Common types of tape cartridges (cont’d):
– AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape)
– SLR (Scalable Linear Recording)
• When selecting a tape drive, consider:
– How many and what type of cartridges the drive can
use
– How it interfaces with the computer
• External drives can connect to a computer using a
USB, FireWire, SCSI, SAS, or eSATA port

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 Supporting Other Types of Storage
Drives
• Storage devices to support might include:
– Optical discs
– USB flash drives
– Memory cards

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File Systems Used by Storage Devices

• File system – used to manage data stored on a

device
– Overall structure the OS uses to name, store, and
organize files on a drive
– In Windows, each storage device is assigned a driver
letter
• Formatting – installing a new file system on a device
• Types of file systems:
– NTFS, exFAT, FAT32 and FAT

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 Standards Used by Optical Drives and
Discs
• CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs (BD) use similar laser
technologies
– Tiny lands and pits on surface represent bits read by
a laser beam
• CD drives use CDFS (Compact Disc File System) or
UDF (Universal Disk Format) file system
• DVD and Blue-ray drives use UDF
• Internal optical drive interfaces with motherboard via
a SATA connection
– External might use eSATA, FireWire, or USB

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 Standards Used by Optical Drives

• Data can be written to:

– One side of a CD
– One or both sides of a DVD or Blu-ray disc
• DVD or Blu-ray disc can hold in two layers on each
side

Figure 6-42 Storage

capacities for CDs, DVDs,
and BD discs
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Replacing an Optical Drive on a Laptop

• Replacing optical drives:

– Unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery pack
– Remove keyboard (not all laptops require this step)
– Remove screw holding DVD drive to the laptop
– Slide drive out of the bay and new drive into the bay
• Ensure connection with drive connector
• Replace the screw

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 Solid State Storage

• Solid-state storage:
– SSD hard drives, USB flash drives, and memory
cards
• USB flash drives go by many names:
– Flash pen drive, jump drive, thumb drive, and key
drive
– Might work at USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 speed
– Use FAT or exFAT file system
– Windows 8/7/Vista has embedded drivers to support
flash drives

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 Solid State Storage

• Memory cards might be used in:

– Digital cameras, tablets, cell phones, MP3 players,
digital camcorders, etc…
– Most laptops have memory card slots
• SD (Secure Digital) Association is responsible for
standards:
– 1.x (regular SD)
– 2.x (SD High Capacity or SDHC)
– 3.x (SD eXtended Capacity or SDXC)
• SD cards come in three physical sizes
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 Solid State Storage

• SDHC and SDXC slots are backward compatible

with SD cards
• Cannot use:
– SDHC card in an SD slot
– SDXC card in an SDHC or SD slot
• SD and SDHC cards use FAT file system
• SDXC cards use exFAT file system

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 Troubleshooting Hard Drives

• Problems caused by hard drive during the boot can

be caused by:
– Hard drive subsystem
– File system on the drive
– Files required by Windows when it begins to load
• When trying to solve a problem with the boot
– Decide if the problem is caused by hardware or
software

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 Slow Performance

• Common complaint:
– Computer is running slowly
• Try running the defragmentation tool on the hard
drive
– The Windows defragmentation tool rearranges
fragments or part of files in contiguous clusters so
files are easier and faster to find

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 Hard Drive Problems During the Boot
• Hardware problems usually show up at POST
• Could be due to the drive, data cable, electrical
system, motherboard, or a loose connection
• Things to do and check before opening case:
– Check to see if UEFI/BIOS displays a numeric error
code or other message during POST
– Check UEFI/BIOS setup for errors in the hard drive
configuration
– Try booting from another bootable media
– For a RAID array, use the firmware utility to check the
status of each disk in the array and check for errors
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 Hard Drive Problems During the Boot
• If the problem is still not solved, open case and check
these things:
– Remove and reattach all drive cables
– If using a RAID, SATA, PATA, or SCSI controller card,
remove and reseat it or place in a different slot
– Inspect drive for damage
– Determine if hard drive is spinning by listening to it
– Check the cable for frayed edges
– Check installation manual
– S.M.A.R.T. errors mean data should be backed up and
drive replaced as soon as possible
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 Hard Drive Problems During the Boot
• If the problem is still not solved, open case and
check these things (cont’d):
– Use Windows tools for checking a hard drive
– Check the drive manufacturer’s web site for
diagnostic software
– Move the device to a working computer and install it
as a second drive
– Exchange the three field replaceable units
• Reconnect or swap the data cable
• Reseat or exchange the controller card
• Exchange the hard drive for a known good drive
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 Hard Drive Problems During the Boot
• If the problem is still not solved, open case and
check these things (cont’d):
– Use Windows tools for checking a hard drive
– Check the drive manufacturer’s web site for
diagnostic software
– Move the device to a working computer and install it
as a second drive
– Try these things to clean the drive and get a fresh
start:
• Format the drive
• Use diskpart to start over with a fresh file system
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 Hard Drive Problems During the Boot
• If the problem is still not solved, open case and
check these things (cont’d):
– Exchange the three field replaceable units
• Reconnect or swap the data cable
• Reseat or exchange the controller card
• Exchange the hard drive for a known good drive
– If your drives whines loudly, try replacing it
– A bad power supply or a bad motherboard also might
cause a disk boot failure

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 Summary

• A hard disk drive (HDD) comes in 3.5” for desktop

and 2.5” and 1.8” for laptops
• A hard drive can be magnetic, solid-state, or hybrid
• Most hard drives, tape drives, and optical drives use
the SATA interface standards
• Three SATA standards provide data rates of 1.5
Gb/sec, 3.0 Gb/sec, and 16.0 Gb/sec
• S.M.A.R.T is a self-monitoring technology whereby
the BIOS monitors the health of a hard drive

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 Summary
• When selecting a hard drive, consider storage
capacity, technology, spindle speed, interface
standard, and buffer size
• SATA drives require no configuration and are
installed using a power cord and a data cable
• Laptop hard drives plug directly into a SATA
connection on the system board
• RAID technology uses an array of hard drives to
provide fault tolerance and/or improvement in
performance

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 Summary

• Hardware RAID is implemented using the

motherboard UEFI/BIOS or a RAID controller card
• Software RAID is implemented in Windows
• Tape drives are an inexpensive way to back up an
entire hard drive or portions of it
• File systems a storage device might use in Windows
include NTFS, exFAT, and FAT
• Optical discs can be recordable (CD-R) or rewritable
(DVD-RW)

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 Summary

• Types of flash memory standards include SD,

MiniSD, MicroSD, SDHC, MiniSDHC, MicroSDHC,
SDXC, MicroSDXC
• Other memory cards include Memory Stick PRO
Duo, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Micro M2,
CompactFlash I and II, and xD-Picture Card
• Problems caused by the hard drive during a boot
can be caused by the hard drive subsystem, file
system, or by files required by Windows to load

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