Book Chapter 8 - Mass Storage Technologies

3. Solid State Drives

The most popular type of mass storage we see in today's systems is called solid-state drives, or SSDs. It's not to say that hard disc drives don't have a place in our systems. It's just that solid state drives are traditionally a lot faster. And it's something we like to use primarily as our boot system. It's not at all uncommon to see one system that has SSDs and HDDs all buckled into it at the same time anyway. Here's a typical SSD. So if you look at this two and a half inch format, it's no big deal. So it looks like a case on the outside, but on the inside it looks something like this. So as we strip away the case, what you're going to see is a lot of electronic chips on there. And if we could open up one of those chips and look with some super duper microscope, we would see that SSDs are organized into pages. So a single physical chip might have hundreds or thousands of pages. With the page itself, we get the atom of all SSDs in a block. So a sage can store lots and lots and lots of blocks. Regardless of the case, as far as your system is concerned, each one of those blocks is assigned an LBA number and we can just plug these guys in. It works out pretty easily. SSDs come in a number of sizes. This is probably the most common one you'll see right here.

So this is a two and a half inch SSD. The other one that is extremely common is this fella right here. These little sticks are called M two. So if you take a look, this is a little shorty looking fella. And here's a big long one. So we have these two sizes that are the most common. The big challenge we run into with SSDs is the interfaces. First generation SSDs, which are still available today, use the same SATA interface as hard disc drives. So, for example, if you take a look at this guy one mine, you're going to see the traditional SATA connection for power and for data. So it's actually kind of interesting. The first time people run into SSDs is like, "Wait a minute, just unplug my hard drive and plug in an SSD." Yeah, that's good for LBA and the Ata interface, just that they're interchangeable. However, one of the things that runs in with SSDs is that they're very, very fast compared to hard disc drives. So we wanted to speed up that interface. So the traditional SATA interface runs at a maximum of around six gigabits per second, which sounds really fast, but it's run even faster. So we have another standard because we're plugging this M dot two drive right into the motherboard. We have another standard called NV Me. I don't remember what NV Me stands for.

Here, put it up on the screen for me. Thank God for my output. Guys, get the name of an acronym anyway. As a result, NV Me drives will typically appear as M dot two, with some exceptions. So I want to take one more look at these two drives I have in front of me. As we look over here on your right, you'll see this one has two notches on the M2, and the one on your left here has a single notch. The one on the right is SATA, just good old traditional SATA. The one on the left is NV Me. NVMe is much faster than SATA. And on top of that, the system itself takes care of the hard drive and all the LBA stuff. So there isn't even really an interface between the CPU and your mass storage, so it makes things a lot faster. The only downside is that with your M2 connections, they're either going to be SATA or they're going to be NV Me. So if you try to plug one into the wrong connection, you won't blow anything up. It just won't work. So when you're buying M two drives, here are some boxes that M two drives came in. If you look right here, I mean, these boxes are identical. But you'll see, this one advertises himself as NV Me, and this one's a little bit smaller, but he advertises himself as Satan. If you're going to be buying M2 and if you're building your own systems, you probably will be. You always want to make sure that your motherboard has the right type of connector that you want. NV Me is becoming quite common today. There are lots of motherboards out there that have M2, but they're only SATA. So when you're buying your M2, make sure you're getting the right interface for your motherboard. And it's the motherboard book. Read the box. It's not that difficult. Get NV Me if you can.

All right, so what I'm actually going to do now is actually install some SSDs, but let's go ahead and start with AME. Now, to do this, I'm going to have to do a little surgery to get it into this white box. Let's go ahead and do that surgery and drop in an NV Me M two. On this particular motherboard, the M two-connectors are underneath this heat sink. So let me pull this off. I've already unscrewed it. And right here you can see an M-two connector. Now you notice it only has one notch, so we instantly know it's NV Me. There's actually another one right here. I can put two M-drives on this particular system. So I'm going to pull him out of the bus. Let's do a little surgery here. So I'm going to go ahead and just insert this. Here we go. I got it. And from this point, put in a screw, screw it down, and I'll drop the heat sink back on and it'll be ready to go. So let's go ahead and get that bolted down one more time. Let's go into our system set up, cross our fingers that our M2 drive is going to appear. Alright, so I'm all booted up here. So on this particular system setup, I know I have to go to boot and if I take a look, you'll see that I have a stamp set SSD.

It's always good to know the model numbers because a lot of times when you're reading about the system set up, it's hard to get an idea. Now, notice it also says M 1, which means I've got two connectors for frat two. This is M two connector number one. So the fact that I've got it plugged in and showing up on my system set up says I've done everything I need to do to get it running. Let's do it one more time. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and leave the Edwin and let's set up this SSD, which has a traditional SATA connector. Give me one sec. I'm just setting the SATA drive here on the power supply just so we can plug it in. I'm not going to permanently mount it because I don't want it to be a permanent part of my setup at this moment. It's sad. So I plug in a data and I plug in a power cord. This guy is ready to go, so I've got him all plugged in. So all I need to do at this point is give him. I'm going to reboot the computer real quick and then come back to the system set up and he should show up here. By the way, remember that I kept the M two in here as well, so this time we should see two drives. Hang on. OK, we're back into our system set up. Let's go over to boot and OOH, look at that, I can see both ones. So that's pretty much all there is in terms of set up physically. I've got an M2 in here. I've got a traditional SATA SSD. The only thing I need to do now is boot into an operating system and set them up so the Windows, Linux, or Mac OS can actually work with those drives.

4. SCSI

The beautiful thing about today's mass storage is the overwhelming popularity. The Ata interface SATA controls all kinds of hard diskdrives and SSDs. It is the thing that we use. Well, not exactly. We go back in time a little bit and take a look at some old mass storage devices that I've got right here in front of me. So take a look at these two guys. First of all, note these cables. What you're looking at here on your left is called Parallel Ata, which means it was parallel because I had a whole bunch of wires in here while we're talking at the same time. Now, over here on the right is a drive known as a SCSI drive, as it stands for Small Computer Systems Interface. This drive, which is about 25 years old by the way, used a parallel interface. You'll notice it's wider. That kind of had its own type of connection. The whole idea behind SCSI is that SCSI was developed at about the same time as Ata. So they were competing languages, and they were incompatible with each other. If you wanted to use SCSI, you had to get a Scussy controller. If you wanted to use a parallel Ata controller because they were competitors,they were always competing with different features. For example, with the old parallel Ata drives, you can only put two or as much as four hard drives into the system.

whereas SCSI allowed you to connect up to seven, sometimes fifteen drive systems. So there were all of these benefits. You saw the SCSI drives in ServerAssist and that type of thing. However, these types of drives are dead in today's world. We live in a series of connections. So these big wide parallel cables are gone, the Atalanguages thing, but instead of going through a bunch of parallel cables, it goes through a serial connection. And the same thing happened with SCS years ago. Today, when we talk about SCSI with storage, we talk about a very specific type of drive called Serial Attached Scuzzy. Now, here is a picture of a serial-attached SCSI connector on a system. If you look at it closely, you'll see that it looks like a Santa connection and it is very similar to it, although they're not absolutely compatible. That's really the cool thing about SCS. Even though SCSI doesn't have its own type of big parallel connectors anymore, or even serial attached SCSI, it isn't very popular. We see SCSI in a lot of crazy places. In fact, another place you're going to see SCSI in what's known as Isczzy is Guzzy, which simply means that you have SCSI devices that are connected to a computer via an ethernet cable. So the only place you're going to be seeing SCSI anymore is in server situations. We never see it on a desktop anymore, but it is on the exam and has become terminology. Make sure you know what SAS is, and make sure you know what IS, because he is going to see it on the.

5. Boot Order

When you fire up your system, the first thing it does is the Power On self test. But once it does the Power On self test, it's going to be looking for a storage device with an installed operating system from which to boot. So in this episode, I'd like to talk about boot order, specifically when you have a lot of storage devices. So let's take a look at the system I've got here. So starting way over here, I've got a couple of traditional hard disc drives. Now really close to me right here, I've got a two and a half inch SSD. Then, in front of the SSD, there is optical media, which, by the way, uses a regular SATA connection just like any other SATA device. No big deal there.

And on top of that, I've got an MTwo on the other side of this motherboard. But if you look here at the very, very top, you're going to see I've got a USB thumb drive on this one system. I've got two hard disc drives. I've got one SATA SSD and I've got one M I've got two SSDs,I've got optical media, and on top of that, I've got a thumb drive, for a total of six mass storage devices. Now the challenge we run into is: which one do I want to boot from first? Now if I only had one single-mass storage device, this would be easy. I would always want to just get off of that. However, there are lots of scenarios where we need to set a boot order. For example, I might have some antimalware tools on that thumbdrive, and whenever I shove that in, I don't want it to boot off of its regular Windows M Two.

I went off of that. Or maybe I nap on a CD Rom or a DVD that has some utilities and I want to boot off of a Linux Live CD to do something. I want to boot off of that and not off. The bottom line is that when you have a lot of different types of storage devices, you have to define the booter. And the place that we define that boot order is in our system set up. Now that we're in the system set up, the first thing I want to do is make sure that the system recognises all of these storage devices. The system is going to be different on this one. It's actually fascinating. It's all graphical. So I'm going to go into this board and it actually shows a picture of my board. So right here are my six static connections, and you can see the four that are highlighted. This is how there's something plugged into it. I can actually go here. You see, it says BC twelve, B One, whatever that is. That is my optical media, and I had to do a little research to find them. Here is the SATA Here's two and a half inches. Here's one of the hard drives and then here's the other one. So four of MYES are right there. So I'm happy about that. Now the other two things we have to worry about are the M and the thumb drive. So now that I know that red means something is plugged into it, I'm going to look at M two slot, and you can see it says straight up, Samsung SSD. That's my mu. So the only one left, and I have got to be honest, I had to check this before we tried it here. I had to find that thumb drive. And it was not obvious, but I had to go here.

And on this particular dongle connection, which I'm not really plugged into the dongle, I use this connection for my front connections. It shows my USB disk. Okay? So the system recognises all of these devices. So what we're going to have to start is we're going to have to pick a boot order. Now we've got this groovy little graphic thing, which is actually kind of fun. And on this particular board, it wants to try to boot in UEF mode. And then you see this without you. That is a more traditional mode. There's really no big motivation for me to boot UEFI because in most of them, I'm installing an operating system. And the operating system itself, once it loads,will kick over and force UEFI mode. So let's take a look. It wants to first boot and notice the outline devices it actually sees. So it wants to first boot Tom's thumb, which is pretty standard. It wishes to remove my M two. Then it wants to boot off the optical media. And then it wants to thumb drive again. But in a more primitive mode. You'll notice that some of the devices don't show up. That's because on this particular motherboard, it's going to want to do these two things, or optical media, before it's ever going to go down to old school hard disc drives. So we can go into boot and you can see that it wants to boot everything. Now keep in mind that I've just plugged a lot of stuff in UEFI that requires a special ID.

So a UEFI capable device like, for example, a bootablethumb drive or a hard drive that already has Windowsor Linux or something like that on it when you boot up the system, the system setup sees this and recognises them differently than how it's recognising them right now. But anyway, this is my default boot order that I want. If I want to, I can turn off the legacy devices completely and go straight to UEFI. I don't recommend this. A lot of optical media and a lot of old harddrives will still want to go into older mode. So whatever the case may be with this particular one, this is actually kind of fun here. If I want to boot off of my optical media, Let's say I have a Windows optical drive. It's graphical. I can just push this to the front, and no matter what, it's always going to boot off of my optical media first. Or if I was going to boot off of my thumbdrive first, I could go ahead and just set that order. You can actually see it changing here as we go about it.

Boot orders are absolutely critical. You're going to see plenty of scenarios, both on the exam and in real life, where somebody has put an ATA drive onto a system and suddenly they think they're on a Windows computer and they're booting Linux. There's nothing wrong with your computer, folks. It's just that the boot order said to boot off of the thumb drive before it got to your Windows hard drive. So when we're talking about boot order, the most important thing to remember is to take your time, go into your system, set up, and check who's who in the zoo. Don't be surprised if the occasional thumbdrive or optical media boots you to a place that you'd never, ever invaded.

Book Chapter 9 - Implementing Mass Storage

1. New Installation - First Drive

We've spent a lot of episodes partitioning and formatting storage, but every time we've done it, we've done it on an existing system that already has a drive installed with Woes or Linux, whatever it might be. And then we plug in more drives, and then we partition and form them. great. But what do you do on a brand new system? I mean, you have a brand new system, a brand newNVMe M-2 drive in there, and it is completely blank. There is no Windows, there is no Linux, there is no nothing. How do you get that first drive partitioned and formatted? Because you need an operating system on there. The answer is that you do it during the install. So on my system right here is a brand new Windows Ten Pro optical media editor put into my DVD drive. Yep, this one still has optical media, and I'm already under the installation a little bit. And I want to show you the process where we actually partition format during the install. So let's follow up on our installation already in progress. As we take a look here, I'm picking which version of Windows I want to install, and I'm doing my license agreement. Now, on this particular Windows installation, it gives me two choices.

Do I want to do an upgrade where I'm upgrading an existing copy of Windows? I want to keep my copy of Office and my games on there. Or is this just installing Windows on a brand new system? So I'm going to go for custom now. Look at what you get here. Right here we have, in essence, an partitioning and formatting tool that's built in. If I do, I could make more partitions here. I could do whatever I wanted. There's only one drive. If I had two drives, I'd see two. If I wanted to delete or extend partitions, I could do all that here. If I want to format it, I can format it. Now, the nice part is, if I leave this alone by default, it's going to take that unallocated space, go ahead and install Windows, make that entire unallocated space, the entire drive, one big partition, and it will format it as NTFS, and take care of it all for me. So I hit next. Installation begins. It seems almost boring, doesn't it? I mean, you just install Windows. It sees that I've got one hard drive by default. It sees and it calls it the partitioned drive. Just call it one big unallocated space. I just say install Wind air, and that's how you partition in format. Interesting.

There's really nothing for us to do other than install, and Windows takes care of it for us. That was so much fun, I wanted to do it again, except this time on Linux. So I've started. We're a few steps into a typical Ubuntu installation, and he's asking me some questions. But here on the screen that's about to pop is the one I'm most interested in showing you. This computer currently has no detected operating systems. What would you like to do? So I boot it off of a thumb drive that has the boot installation files on it. Now, if I'm lazy, I can just erase everything in here and install Ubuntu, or I can have a little bit more fun and click on things. So right now it sees I only have a hard drive. This is how the hard drive manifests in Ubuntu Linux. So it's deva. So I'm going to go ahead and say I'm going to make my new partition table. Do you want to do this? Yes, I do. So I've now actually set up a partition on this particular system, and I'm going to select the space that I've just created, and I'm going to hit install. Installing on Linux is a little bit more persnickety. I'm going into advanced options, to be honest with you.

When I'm installing Ubuntu Linux, that first option where it says, "Just erase that, get Ubuntu," is the one I use 99% of the time. The important takeaway from this episode is that partitioning and formatting must happen before you use any form of message. If you already have an operating system running, there are tools built into the operating system that allow you to partition and format more mass storage that you add to the system on a new installation. When there is no operating system, it's up to the actual installation of the operating system itself to have a little bit of partitioning and formatting tools to install the operating system right there. No matter what happens, you will always partition and you will always format. You.

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