Multimedia Devices and Mass Storage

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Chapter 9

• Multimedia Devices and Mass Storage

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You Will Learn

• How multimedia works on a PC
• 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 install and troubleshoot multimedia and
  mass storage components

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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, SSE, and 3DNow!
• Improve speed of processing graphics, video, and
  sound
• Use improved methods of handling high-volume
  repetition during I/O operations
• Software must be written to use the specific
  capabilities

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Multimedia Devices

• Sound cards
• Record sound, save it to a file on hard drive,
  play it back
• Externally attached devices
• Digital cameras
• MP3 players

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Stages of Computerized Sound

• Digitize or input sound (analog to digital)
• Includes sampling
• Data is measured at a series of representative
  points
• Sampling rate cycles per second, or hertz (Hz)
• Store digital data in compressed data file
• Reproduce or synthesize sound (digital to analog)

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Sound Card Manufacturers
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Installing a Sound Card

• Physically install the card in an empty PCI slot
  on the motherboard
• Install sound card driver
• Install sound applications software

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Installing a Sound Card
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Verifying Installation of a Sound Card and Driver
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Digital Cameras

• Scan field of image and translate light signals
  into digital values
• Digital values can be stored as a file and
  viewed, manipulated, and printed with software
  that interprets them appropriately
• Use TWAIN format for transferring images

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A Flash RAM Card
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Digital Camera Manufacturers
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MP3 Players
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MP3 Players

• A device that plays MP3 files (a version of MPEG
  compression)
• MP3 can reduce size of a sound file as much as
  124 without much loss in quality

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Compression Methods Used with MP3 Players

• MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) standard
• Tracks movement from one frame to the next and
  stores only what changes
• Can yield compression ratio of 1001 for
  full-motion video
• Cuts out or drastically reduces sound that is not
  normally heard by the human ear

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MPEG Standards

• MPEG-1
• Used in business and home applications to
  compress images
• MPEG-2
• Used to compress video films on DVD-ROM
• MPEG-3
• Used for audio compression
• MPEG-4
• Used for video transmissions over the Internet

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How MP3 Players Work

• Play MP3 files downloaded from a PC, using
  internal memory and flash storage devices (eg,
  SmartMedia, CompactFlash, or Memory Stick)

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MP3 Player Manufacturers
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Video Capture Card

• Captures input from a camcorder or directly from
  TV
• Features to look for
• IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port
• 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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Video Capture Card Manufacturers
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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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CD-ROM

• Read-only data physically embedded into disc
  surface
• Surface laid out as one continuous spiral of
  sectors of equal length that hold equal amounts
  of data

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CD-ROM

• Used to distribute software and sound files
• Combines constant linear velocity (CLV) and
  constant angular velocity (CAV)
• Look for multisession feature
• CD-ROM drives are read-only and slower to access
  than hard drives

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CD-ROM Drive Manufacturers
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CD-ROMs

• Caring for CD-ROM drives and discs
• Use precautions when handling
• CD-ROM drive interface with motherboard
• IDE interface (most common)
• SCSI interface
• Proprietary expansion card that works only with
  CD-ROMs from a particular manufacturer
• Proprietary connection on sound card
• Portable drive plug into external port on PC

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Installing a CD-ROM Drive
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Installing a CD-ROM 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)

• Storage capacity
• 8.5 GB (one side)
• 17 GB (both sides)
• Uses shorter wavelength laser than CD a second
  opaque layer also holds data
• Uses MPEG-2 video compression requires MPEG-2
  controller to decode compressed data
• Audio is stored in Dolby AC-2 compression

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DVD Device
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DVD Devices
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DVD Drive Manufacturers
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Installing a DVD Drive
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DVD Decoder Card
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Rear Panel of DVD Drive
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Rear Panel of DVD Drive
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Installing a DVD Drive
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Installing a DVD Drive
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Hardware Used for Backups and Fault Tolerance

• On standalone PCs or small servers
• Tape, Zip, and Jaz drives
• Read-write CDs
• In a business environment with PC connected to
  file server
• Back up data to 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 Drive Manufacturers
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How a Tape Drive Interfaces with a Computer

• External
• Parallel port
• Internal
• IDE ATAPI interface
• External or internal
• SCSI bus
• Proprietary controller card or floppy drive
  interface

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External Drive UsingParallel Port
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An ATAPI IDE Tape Drive
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Tapes Used by a Tape Drive

• Full-sized data cartridges
• Minicartridges

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Several Tape Drive Standards
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Tape Formats and Tape Types

• Quarter-Inch Committee (QIC) or quarter-inch
  cartridge standards
• Developed in 1983 only a few in use today
• Travan by 3M
• Different levels (TR-1 through TR-5), each based
  on a different QIC standard

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Removable Drives

• Can be internal or external
• Increase overall storage capacity of a system
• Make it easy to move large files from one
  computer to another
• Serve as a convenient medium for making backups
  of hard drive data
• Make it easy to secure important files

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Removable Drives

• Considerations when purchasing
• Drop height
• Half-life of the disk
• Plug and Play compliance

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Types of Removable Drives

• Iomega 3½ Zip drive
• Stores 100 MB or 250 MB of data
• Drop height of 8 feet
• SuperDisk by Imation or Maxell
• Stores 120 MB or 240 MB, respectively
• Backward compatibility with regular floppy disks
• Iomega Jaz drive
• Stores 1 GB or 2 GB of data
• Drop height of 3 feet

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Zip Drive
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Installing a Removable Drive

• Internal removable drive
• Similar to installing a hard drive
• External removable drive
• Different process

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RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)

• Data protection methods used to improve
  performance and/or automatically recover from a
  failure
• Most often used on high-end, high-cost file
  servers

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Common RAID Levels
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RAID 0(Disk Striping without Parity)

• Increases logical drive capacity by treating two
  or more drives as a single logical drive
• Includes only one copy of data does not enable
  recovery from failure

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RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring or Disk Duplexing)

• Designed to protect data from hard drive failure
  by writing data twice, once to each of two drives
• Disk mirroring
• Two hard drives use same controller
• Duplexing
• Each hard drive has its own controller on its own
  adapter card

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RAID 1 Disk Mirroring

• Advantages
• If either drive fails, data is safe on other
  drive
• Disk reads are speeded up
• Disadvantages
• Expensive
• Cuts hard drive capacity in half
• Disk writes are slowed down

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RAID 4(Disk Striping with Parity)
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RAID 5 (Disk Striping with Distributed Parity)

• Currently most popular RAID implementation
• Provides optimum fault tolerance and improves
  drive capacity
• Requires at least three hard drives
• Distributes parity information over all the
  drives, thus removing performance bottleneck
  created by having a single parity drive (as in
  RAID 4)

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Windows Support for RAID
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Troubleshooting Guidelines

• Do not touch chips on circuit boards or disk
  surfaces where data is stored
• Do not stack components on top of one another
• Do not subject them to magnetic fields or ESD

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Problems with CD-ROM orDVD Installation

• Computer does not recognize the drive (no drive D
  listed in Windows 9x Explorer)

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Troubleshooting Sound Problems

• Problem with sound card itself
• Result of system settings
• Bad connections

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Troubleshooting Tape Drives

• A minicartridge does not work
• Data transfer is slow
• Drive does not work after installation
• Drive fails intermittently or gives errors

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Chapter Summary

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