Basic Cable Types and Peripherals
- Network Cables
- Three major types
- Coaxial
- Twisted pair
- Fiber
- Copper
- Separated into categories that differentiate the speed ratings of the twisted pairs
- All have 4 pairs of twisted cables in one sheath
- Cat 5
- Speeds up to 100mbps over a length of 100 meters
- Cat 5e
- Speeds up to 1Gbps over a length of 100 meters
- The 4 pairs are separated resulting in less interference
- Coaxial
- Single copper cored in a insulated layer
- Further protected in a wire mesh conductor and then protected in a outer insulation layer
- Not used much in modern systems but will show on the test for use in cable and satellite applications
- Specified by the Radio Guide RG System
- Will need to know the RG-59 which is a solid core copper and used for Cable TV
- Twisted Copper Pair
- Individual wires twisted together like in Ethernet cables
- Can be Unshielded or Shielded
- Unshielded Twisted Pair
- UTP
- Twisted in direct contact with each other
- Each wire in a twisted pair is shielded so that the pairs dont touch copper to copper
- Shielded Twisted Pair
- Made of two to four pairs of twisted wires
- Each pair is contained in a braided foil before being sheathed
- used in cat 7 and 8
- Direct Burial
- should be buried 6-8 inches underground
- should be stp cables
- put in pvc piping and run away from other electrical lines
- Plenum
- a teflon like material to cover cables that will be exposed to high heat or near ventilation systems so they don’t release gasses
- Optical
- uses light pulses to transmit data
- Fiber
- small strings of flexible glass that can carry speeds of 100mbps to 10gbps� several miles
- fiber optic cables
- immune to electrical interference and wiretapping
- two types
- single mode
- only carries one light sources by laser
- reaches further
- multi mode
- uses an led to carry multiple paths
- T568A/T568B
- These are the two standards for RJ45 wiring
- A is green white, green, orange white, blue, blue white, orange, brown white, brown
- B is orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown
- Peripheral cables
- Attach things to computers like monitors keyboards and mice
- USB 2.0
- has a max of 480 mbps and is considered hi-speed
- USB 3.0
- max of 5gbps and is considered SuperSpeed
- Serial
- built for serial connections with a corresponding serial connector at the end
- most common is the db9 which has 9 pins
- Thunderbolt
- Primarily used for video connections
- Has 4 standards
- 1 and two end in a mini display-port
- 3 and 4 end in a USB c
- can be used for other peripherals as well
- Video cables
- HDMI
- High Definition Multimedia Interface
- Standard cables have 19 pins
- video and audio on one cable
- Display-Port
- Designed to use less power than other cables
- backwards compatible with VGA and DVI
- video and audio
- has two hooks to connect in place
- DVI
- Digital Visual Interface
- Designed to address shortcomings of analog signals
- three standards
- DVI A for analog
- DVI D for digital
- DVI I for analog and digital
- typically white cables
- Hard Drive Cables
- Connect hard drives to the motherboard
- can be on board or off board
- consist of circuitry and a header or port
- SATA
- Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
- Most common
- flat with a terminating connector that can only fit into the motherboard one way
- sata is 7 pins, sata power is 15 pins
- sata 1.0 is 1.5 Gbps, 2.0 3Gbps, 3.0 6Gbps, 3.2 16Gbps
- SCSI
- small computer system interface
- used for storage device connection
- ribbon or round cables that have 50 68 or 80 wires
- up to 16 devices can be daisy chained together including the motherboard and scsi controller card
- ESata
- external sata
- only for data not power
- external to housing
- esata that provides power is called power over esata, esata+, esatap, or esata/USB
- IDE
- integrated drive electronics
- renamed parallel advanced technology attachment PATA
- colored strip to indicate pin 1
- three separate cables, one for power and 2 for drives
- Adapters
- used to convert one type of cable to another
- Connector types
- RJ11 is phone wire
- RJ45 twisted pair cable Ethernet
- F-Type used on coaxial for satellite and cable connection
- ST or straight tip used for fiber optic
- SC subscriber connector used for fiber optic push pull style
- LC Lucent connector half the size of SC used for fiber optic in an office or data center setting
- Punch down block electrical connection device allows multiple copper wires to be punched down or inserted into a slot
- Micro USB smallest connection contains 5 pins and is directional
- USB C most recent USB type 24 pins and oval allowing reversible connection
- Molex Older two piece pin and socket interconnection used for drive connections
- Lightning port 8 pin apple proprietary connector that is reversible
- DB9 trapezoid shaped 9 pin connector of two rows 4 and 5 pins used for serial connections to network device consoles or management ports
- Installing Ram
- Ram types
- Virtual ram
- space on a hard drive that can be allocated when additional ram is needed by an application
- this is known as the swap or page file
- small outline dual inline memory module
- SODIMM
- found in laptops where space is crucial
- 100 144 200 204 260 pin configurations
- SODIMM defines the physical form factor of the module
- Double Data Rate 3
- DDR3
- faster than ddr2 and uses 30% less power
- 288 pin DIMM and 260 pin SODIMM
- Double Data Rate 5
- doubles the speed of ddr4
- 6.4 Gbps and power efficiency of 1.1 v and available in up to 128gb modules
- Error correcting code ECC ram
- logic built in to detect and correct single bit memory errors
- for each byte of 8 bits a parity bit is set that will allow logic to detect and correct up to one bit of each byte
- will not work for more than 1 bit
- Single Channel
- transfers data in chunks the same size as the systems bus’s bandwidth
- Dual Channel
- when the memory controller coordinates two memory banks to work in conjunction with one another as a synchronized set allowing a doubling of size of data transfer to the CPU
- Triple Channel
- coordinates 3 channels to the CPU
- quad channel
- coordinates 4 channels to the CPU
- Storage types
- Hard drive
- non volatile storage device used for quick access
– hard disk drive
– uses a spinning metal platter to store memory
– 7200 10000, and 15000 rpm speeds
- SSD
- solid state drive
- flash memory tech
- no moving parts
- erases data in blocks rather than at the byte level
- Communication interfaces
- NVME non volatile memory express
- open source standard used to optimize data transfer speeds and can support up to 3.5 Gbps
- SATA
- serial at attachment interface is the slowest
- PCIe peripheral component interconnect express offers faster speeds but slower than NVME
- Form factors
- M.2
- a form factor for SSD 22 mm wide and can vary in length from 80mm and 60mm
- known as gum stick memory because of its size and shape
- plugs into the M.2 slot on the mother board
- msata
- mini serial sata 30 mm wide 52 pin connector and use a sata connection for communication
- can be 50.95 mm or 26.8 mm
- Drive configurations
- Redundant array of independent inexpensive disks RAID 0,1,5,10
- Raid 0 offers striping of data only no redundancy
- raid 1 mirroring of data only requires more storage space to store full copies of data
- raid 5 offers striping with parity minimum of 3 drives ability to calculate missing data and rebuild
- raid 10 offers striping and mirroring for full redundancy minimum of 4 drives
- Removable storage
- flash drives
- contain large quantity of storage in a small form factor
- Memory cards
- flash memory in the form of a SD Card CF, Micro SD, and xD
- Optical cards
- flash storage devices that store information through the use of lasers CD DVD or Blueray
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