Hardware

What is Computer Hardware ?

Computer hardware refers to the physical parts of a computer and related devices. Internal hardware devices include motherboards, hard drives, and RAM. External hardware devices include monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, and scanners. In operation, a computer is both hardware and software. One is useless without the other. If hardware is not working properly then Software also does not can perform properly.

The internal hardware parts of a computer are often referred to as components, while external hardware devices are usually called peripherals. Together, they all fall under the category of computer hardware. But any part of computer does not perform then the system not perform properly. Software, on the other hand, consists of the programs and applications that run on computers. Because software runs on computer hardware, software programs often have system requirements that list the minimum hardware required for the software to run.






Input and Output Devices:-
An input device is any device that provides input to a computer. There are dozens of possible input devices, but the two most common ones are a keyboard and mouse. Every key you press on the keyboard and every movement or click you make with the mouse sends a specific input signal to the computer. These commands allow you to open programs, type messages, drag objects, and perform many other functions on your computer.
Since the job of a computer is primarily to process input, computers are pretty useless without input devices. Just imagine how much fun you would have using your computer without a keyboard or mouse. Not very
much. Therefore, input devices are a vital part of every computer system.































Any device that outputs information from a computer is called, not surprisingly, an output device. Since most information from a computer is output in either a visual or auditory format, the most common output devices are the moniter and speakers. These two devices provide instant feedback to the user's input, such as displaying characters as they are typed or playing a song selected from a playlist.

While monitors and speakers are the most common output devices, there are many others. Some examples include headphones, printers, projectors, lighting control systems, audio recording devices, and robotic machines. A computer without an output device connected to it is pretty useless, since the output is what we interact with. Anyone who has ever had a monitor or printer stop working knows just how true this is. Of course, it is also important to be able to send information to the computer, which requires an input device.


















Primary and Secondary Devices:-

The storage devices are broadly classified into Secondary storage and primary storage. The secondary storage is known as peripheral storage, and is used to stores information of the computer that is not in current use. The secondary storage is typically slower and is of higher capacity than primary storage. The secondary storage is almost non-volatile. The secondary storage is slow due to serial access.
The Primary storage is used to refer for local random access disk storage and is properly called secondary storage. If this type of storage is called primary storage, then the term secondary storage would refer to offline. This usually occurs in the slower, larger forms of storage which is used to develop the vendors to provide secure device management services, authentication services, as well as encryption for data. There is software and application based solutions; however software-based encryption solutions can impact performance during the storage process. Vendors provide hardware based solutions, which are appliances that provide authentication to protect the data. These devices are taken into account for the different requirements of securing data on primary or secondary storage. The primary storage performance and access specifications for the tape environment and requires the encrypting to tape would require integration with backup schemas for primary storage scenarios.
NeoScale research indicated that users looking to encrypt data onto tape had lower price and different deployment requirements. These factors drove NeoScale to provide two product offerings to address the needs of each storage environment.
The secondary storage helps in securing the data on media types and storage categories, as data is vulnerable to network attacks, administrative access and media theft. There are many organizations who are working with third parties and disaster recovery efforts. Often data goes offsite and is in the hands of employees that are not authorized to see critical company data. And storage consolidation opens the door to greater administrative access. All of these trends drive the need to ensure the data at rest is secure.
However, the nature of the data located on primary storage certain specifications for encryption appliances. First, let’s look at data located on primary storage arrays. Primary data is critical to the operation of the organization on a daily basis. Primary storage often contains current financial, customer, design, process or transactional information. The data must be highly available and access should be immediate, with minimal latency, particularly in transactional database environments.
Many applications do not work effectively if there is excessive latency in the data path. An encryption appliance for primary storage would need to address all of these issues. Performance would be critical; the appliance cannot introduce any latency into the data path. The appliance itself would also need to be extremely secure and transparent to the network, providing levels of authentication for access to the device itself. Unauthorized users should not be able to access the encryption keys or change the configuration of the device, including policies and administration permissions. Thus, both the primary and secondary storage plays the vital part in maintaining the system storage.