Storage Drives & Cables (S9-10)

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Mechanical magnetic storage device with spinning platters and read/write heads.

Solid-State Drive (SSD)

High-speed non-volatile flash storage device with no moving parts.

NVMe

High-performance storage communication protocol operating over the PCIe interface.

SATA

Serial interface used to connect internal storage drives to motherboards.

M.2

Compact drive form factor connecting directly to motherboard PCIe or SATA lanes.

RAID 0

Disk striping providing maximum performance but no fault tolerance.

RAID 1

Disk mirroring providing full data redundancy across two physical drives.

RAID 5

Disk striping with distributed parity requiring at least three drives.

RAID 6

Disk striping with double parity allowing up to two simultaneous drive failures.

RAID 10

Combination of disk striping and mirroring requiring at least four drives.

S.M.A.R.T.

Drive monitoring system used to detect and predict hardware failure.

USB-C

Reversible 24-pin connector supporting high-speed data, video, and power delivery.

Thunderbolt

High-speed interface supporting data, PCIe, and DisplayPort video signals.

HDMI

Digital video and audio interface standard used for displays and TVs.

DisplayPort

Packetized digital audio/video interface standard with optional locking mechanism.

DVI

Digital Visual Interface supporting digital (DVI-D), analog (DVI-A), or integrated (DVI-I) video.

VGA

Legacy 15-pin analog video interface connector.

eSATA

External SATA interface used for connecting external storage drives.

DB-9

9-pin D-subminiature serial port connector used for router console management.

Molex

4-pin internal power connector delivering +12V and +5V to fans and legacy drives.