UPS

Reviewing what I have learned today, I found myself interested in Uninteruptable Power Supplies (UPS), and I decided to do some more research on it. 

Basically, UPS is an electric apparatus that provides emergency power to a load when the input power source fails. It's usually used to protect computers, data centers and telecommunication equipment as to not lose any data.

UPS have several devices, such as:

Standby - Also known as off-line or line-preferred UPS. The standby system operates with the switch setting the AC input as a primary power source, and alternating to the battery and inverter as backup sources in case of primary power failure. The inverter remains on standby, and only activates when the power fails. This only happens when the system is below 9V.

Line Interactive - The AC Power Inverter is connected to the UPS output, and the battery can be charged by operating in reverse while AC power is set normally. In case of a power failure, the transfer switch can shift electrical flow from the battery to the system output. The inverter is always connected to the output, so the UPS gives additional filtering and lowers the risk of switching transients. A tap-changing transformer is sometimes included in the line interactive UPS, and this allows it to provide voltage regulation that prevents the UPS from switching to battery power prematurely.


In General, UPS is very useful for many people to have. It is crucial for computer servers, companies, tech supports, and more.

Proper Netiquette

What is netiquette?

It is the conductor that is socially acceptable in online or digital situations. This includes emails, social networking sites, and instant messaging/chat rooms. If you decide to not use netiquette, well.. you should probably step away from anything that has access to the internet.

Here are some examples of netiquette.

1. Do not use abusive or threatening language.
2. Do not try obtaining somebody's password and/or personal information.
3. Do not spam message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites with useless or repetitive messages.
4. Do not steal or take credit for anything you have not done.

All of these points can relate to having respect. There isn't anyone who would appreciate having these things done to them, and no one should ever do them.

AGP

Accelerated Graphics Ports (AGP) is a high speed point-to-point channel for attaching a video card to a computer's motherboard, usually just to assist with 3D computer graphics. It was intended to be designed as a successor to PCI type connections.

Why was it being favored over PCI?

Computers are always being more and more graphically oriented. Successive generations of graphic adapters began to push the limits of PCI by having a bus with shared bandwidth. This led to even more developing with the AGP.

For the most part, it is favored more as AGP gives a more dedicated pathway between the slot and the processor rather than sharing the PCI bus. AGP also uses sideband addressing. This means that the address and the data buses are separated so the packet doesn't need to read the information.

RAID

Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit. The data is distributed over the drives in one of several ways, called "RAID Levels", but it depends on the redundancy for the required performance.

RAID now covers a wide variety of functions for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data amongst several drives. It's an example of storage virtualization and the array can be accessed by the operating system by just one drive. There are different schemes, each having a balance of the key goals: reliability and availability, performance and capacity. 

The standard schemes are referred to as the "levels". There was originally five, but it continues to have more variations involved.

RAID 0
Has no redundancy, but provides improved performance and additional storage with no fault tolerance. Any failure of drive destroys the array and it is likely for more drives in the array to fail.

RAID 1
Data is written identically to two drives which provides a mirrored set. The request is serviced by the two drives containing the data. At least two disks are required to constitute the array.

RAID 2
All disk spindle rotation is synchronized and data is striped so each sequential bit is on a different drive.

RAID 3
All disk spindle rotation is synchronized and data is striped so each sequential byte is on a different drive. This level is not commonly used.

RAID 4
It is equivalent to RAID 5 except all parity data is stored on a single drive. The arrangement files may be distributed around multiple drives.

RAID 5
Distributes parity along with the data that requires all drives but one to be presented to operate. The array is not destroyed by one single drive failure. If there is failure, any subsequent rads can be calculated from the parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. It requires 3 disks

RAID 6
Provides fault tolerance for up to two failed drives. This makes larger RAID groups more practical, especially for high-availability systems. This is increasingly import as large capacity drives lengthen the time needed to recover from a failure of a drive.

RAID 10
Often referred to as RAID 1+0 Data are written in strips across primary disks that have been mirrored to the secondary disks.