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The most common type of floppy drive is the 1.44MB 3.5-inch drive, which uses DSHD media.
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3.5-inch floppy drives use a 34-pin cable, which is twisted to enable the system to distinguish drive A: from drive B:.
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Each IDE channel can handle up to two ATA/IDE drives.
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Master and slave jumpers are used with the 40-wire ATA/IDE cable to determine drive priority and can also be used with the 80-wire cable.
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Cable select uses different positions on the 80-wire UDMA-66 cable to determine drive priority. Both drives must be jumpered as cable select to use this feature.
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Serial ATA (SATA) is a high-speed version of ATA that uses a seven-wire cable that runs directly from the host adapter to the drive.
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ATA RAID uses two or more ATA drives to create striped (RAID 0) or mirrored (RAID 1) drive arrays for extra read/write speed or extra reliability.
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LBA (Logical Block Addressing) translation is necessary on all ATA/IDE drives over 528MB (504MiB) to enable Windows to use the entire capacity of the drive.
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Each device in a SCSI daisy-chain must use a unique device ID, and each end of the daisy-chain must be terminated .
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The transfer rates of CD and DVD drives are measured using a X-rating value, but DVD drives use a larger value for X than CD drives do.
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CD/DVD mastering creates a layout from files selected by the user and transferred to a recordable CD or DVD. The process is often called CD or DVD burning.
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Packet writing typically uses rewritable CD or DVD media to store drag-and-drop files, using the drive like a large floppy disk.
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The actual storage capacity of a tape drive varies with whether the data is stored in compressed or noncompressed (native) mode and the amount of compression that can be performed with different types of data.