CST 334 - Week 8

 In computer science, persistence is necessary for most programs. Persistence is when data is maintained even in the case that the process crashes or exits. For example, in the last class, we created an application that stored user data. Even after killing the application, we would be able to log in with those credentials when re-opening the app due to persistent data. When a user writes a letter in Microsoft Word and wants to save it for later, they save the file to a certain folder and the software does the rest. In this module we learned the basics of how a hard drive works and how files and directories make up the interface for how our system stores data.

As a computer science student, we are challenged every day to expand our thinking and wrap our head around complex concepts. We must continue on in the face of these challenges in order to grow and improve our skills. For me, this class was an especially good opportunity for me to be persistent. Computer architecture has always been my weak spot, but I know that if I keep pushing myself it will all be worth it in the end.

CST 334 - Week 7

 For this section we first learned about I/O devices and how they interact with an operating system. One thing that stuck out to me in this section was how components that require high performance, like a graphics card, are located near the CPU and lower performance components are located further away. Slow devices would be connected to a peripheral bus, while those high-performance devices would be connected via PCI, or Peripheral Component Interconnect. We next covered hard disks in more detail, reading about basic disk operations and scheduling I/O requests. Following this, we covered RAID, or the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, which is a technique use to build a faster and more reliable disk system. This works similarly to a computer system whose responsibility is managing a group of disks. Finally we learned about file systems and how they work to promote persistent storage.