Technical Terms C

Cable – The connecting ribbon or cable to a Bus and a peripheral device like a hard drive, floppy disk drive or DVD / CD-R drive.

Cable Select – Jumper settings to represent a Master/Slave configuration based on the device in accordance to its location on the cable.

Cache – Temporary storage within high speed memory of commonly used data for quicker accessing.

Capacity – Term used to determine the total size of storage capacity or space.

Channel – Electronic circuits comprised to processing data to and from a host to another device.

Clean Room – A room equipped with HEPA Filters to control, reduce and eliminate airborne contaminants to work on sensitive electronic devices such as a hard drive’s disk assembly.

Clicking – The sound made from the heads of a hard disk drive slamming into the physical stops due to its inability to read and locate the location that it is at.

Cluster – The smallest amount of logical disk space that can be allocated to store a file.

CMOS – Acronym for Complimentary (Symmetry) Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor. This package comes in a small group of semiconductors in an integrated circuit that stores pertinent boot or access information. Normally found on computer motherboards and other configurable electronic devices.

Cold Boot – Turning the computer on after the system has been shut down and powered off.

Cold Swap – Computer or system must be turned off prior to removing any devices.

Controller – An extension card (controller card), chip or interface that connects with a peripheral device and a computer to transfer information.

Cookies – Information stored while accessing internet web sites. These files can contain information of viewing, purchasing and online member history.

CPU – Acronym for Central Processing Unit. More commonly known as “the Box” with the assumption that it is the computer, but specifically it is the actual micro processor of the computer. This chip performs mostly all of the calculations that make computers operate.

Crash – The immediate shutdown or termination of all programming. Crashing tends to be severe as the system can not operate due to software and or hardware failures.

CRC – Acronym for Cyclic Redundancy Check. A mathematical polynomial stored in two bytes of data for each write block. If the computation is read back with fault compared to the write block the sum is no longer 0, which then reports back an error.

Cross Linked Files – When two pieces of data are being directed to the same location from the directory or file tables.

Cylinder – Circular divisions of a hard drives media stacked vertically where data is stored. The cylinder count is where the head assembly addresses the media and all tracks readable by the heads at that moment.