Inside a typical minitower PC

1
Inside a typical mini-tower PC

• Power Supply
• ATA CD-ROM drive
• Floppy Disc Drive
• ATA Hard Discs
• Parallel ATA Cables (attached to motherboard)
• cf PATA, SATA

2
IDE/ATA and SATA

• ATA Advanced Technology Attachments
• IDE (Parallel ATA) is the cheap, common
  Intelligent Drive Electronics system used on most
  PCs (33MHz/66MHz/100MHz/133MHz)
• IDE was originally just a dumb extension of the
  ISA bus with smart drives handling data transfers

3
IDE/ATA and SATA

• Serial ATA drives started taking over in 2003
  (start at 150Mbps, now does 300Mbps 2006 )
• SCSI is the Small Computer Systems Interface, a
  smart, fast but more expensive system commonly
  found in PC servers and Macintosh systems (up to
  80MBps)

4
IDE/ATA and SATA
5
HDD - Hard Disc Drives

• Change has been rapid over the last twenty years
• Fast mass-storage once meant 80ms access time
  for 10MB hard drives, now 8ms access time and
  over 100GB is common
• Matchbox-sized drives for cameras and media
  players can have over 4GB of storage room

6
CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD/-RW

• CD-ROM drives have increased in speed by a factor
  of 50 since their introduction
• but only increased their storage capacity by 20
• Recordable and re-recordable CD is popular
• DVD drives offer multi-gigabyte storage
• DVD stands for
• Digital Video Disc (original name)
• Digital Versatile Disc (they made this up later)

7
FDD

• The humble floppy disc drive is still the lowest
  common denominator for data transfer
• It hasnt really developed since the mid-eighties
• The 2.8MB floppy never quite made it
• IDE, SCSI and parallel port devices such as Zip
  drives have become more common
• Many PCs dont have floppy disc drives any more
• Flash USB drives (128MB to 4GB) are taking over

8
Serial, Parallel, USB

• Parallel and serial ports are built into older
  PCs
• USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports are taking over
• You often see 1P/2S/2USB/1IRDA or similar on
  condensed motherboard specification sheets
• PS/2 style mouse and keyboard ports are
  standard now, but will be replaced by USB
• USB2.0 can handle slow, medium or fast
  peripherals, USB1.1 can handle slow and medium

9
Modern Motherboard Extras

• Many motherboards come with IEEE1394 (a.k.a
  FireWire or i.Link) for DV camera connection
• FireWire is a high performance, versatile
  LAN-style connector
• Runs at about 400Mbps (similar to USB2)
• Another device commonly integrated with
  motherboards is a LAN (local area network)
  connection, often capable of 100Mbps or more

10
Summary

• Many of these physical connectors are visible at
  the back of the PC
• That concludes our tour of the built-in devices