Tech essays

Tech essays The PowerPC G4 is one of the elite performing products produced by Apple, Motorola, and IBM. It is actually the first microprocessor that can deliver a sustained performance of over one giga-flop, which is a lot. The PowerPC G4 Velocity Engine can process information in 128-bit chunks, compared to the 32 or 64-bit chunks in traditional processors. In addition, the G4 can perform four 32-bit floating-point calculations in a single cycle, which is two to four times faster than traditional processors. But with all this speed arises the need to store it. The Macintosh G4 has a 60GB ultra hard drive, but sometimes that is not enough in order to gain the max benefit in a profession. RAID, Redundant Arrays of Independent Disk, is one option of extra data storage that has revolutionized the way large files has been stored in computers. RAID technology offers significant improved reliability, availability, and serviceability. It is a method of combining multiple hard drives so that they behave as a single hard drive. RAID arrays can be created for two main reasons: increased performance and increased data security. There are several ways to achieve both goal, and each method is referred to as a RAID level. Level 0, the first type of RAID, employs multiple hard drives for increased read/write access times. Because each drive has to work less, storing or retrieving a file to a RAID 0 array can be much faster than storing a file to a single hard drive. RAID level 1, is the second type used exclusively for data security and does not increase performance at all. RAID 1 uses two hard drives of equal size and provides two perfect copies of the data stored on the main drive. This means that if one of the two hard drives should fail there is a complete and current copy waiting to be used. The final type RAID levels 3,4,5 all employ multiple hard drives for speed, but they also employ special techniques for data security. ...