Systems Software & Architecture Final Exam Study Guide

Question 1

A storage device consists of a read/write mechanism and a storage medium.

Answer

true

Question 2

Wait states increase CPU and computer system performance.

Answer

true

Question 3

Primary storage extends the limited capacity of CPU registers.

Answer

true

Question 4

The CPU moves data and instructions continually between registers and primary storage.

Answer

true

Question 5

With current technology, secondary storage speed is typically faster than primary storage speed.

Answer

true

Question 6

Block size is normally stated in bytes and is generally the same between storage devices, especially in a single storage device.

Answer

true

Question 7

512- and 4096-byte blocks are the most common data transfer units for magnetic disks.

Answer

true

Question 8

Volatility is a matter of degree and conditions.

Answer

true

Question 9

Magnetic tape and disk are considered volatile storage media.

Answer

true

Question 10

The physical structure of a storage device’s read/write mechanism and storage medium determines the ways in which data can be accessed.

Answer

true

Question 11

Serial access time depends on the current position of the read/write mechanism and the position of the target data item in the storage medium.

Answer

true

Question 12

Cost per unit decreases as an access method moves from serial to random to parallel.

Answer

true

Question 13

Secondary storage is generally expensive compared with primary storage.

Answer

true

Question 14

Capacitors can charge and discharge much faster than batteries.

Answer

true

Question 15

SRAM has higher density then DRAM.

Answer

true

Question 16

Electrical current can generate a magnetic field but a magnetic field cannot generate electricity.

Answer

true

Question 17

Disk drives share one set of read/write circuits among all read/write heads.

Answer

true

Question 18

HTH switching time is the most important component of access time.

Answer

true

Question 19

Because sequential access time is so much faster than average access time, disk performance is improved dramatically if related data is stored in sequential sectors.

Answer

true

Question 20

Communication channel capacity is generally a restriction on a single disk drive’s data transfer rate.

Answer

true

Question 21

Coercible material per sector is greater at the center than in the platter edge.

Answer

true

Question 22

To increase capacity per platter, disk manufacturers divide tracks into two or more zones and vary the sectors per track in each zone.

Answer

true

Question 23

Computing average access time is more complex when sectors are more densely packed on the platter’s outer portions because the assumption that an average access requires moving the read/write head over half the tracks is no longer valid.

Answer

true

Question 24

SSDs are much more tolerant to shock and other negative environmental factors commonly encountered with portable devices, such as multifunction cell phones, netbooks, and laptop computers.

Answer

true

Question 25

Magnetic disk drives have an advantage over SSDs in power consumption.

Answer

true

Question 26

Most optical storage media can retain data for decades because they aren’t subject to magnetic decay and leakage.

Answer

true

Question 27

Rewritable DVDs use a single standard adopted by the entire industry.

Answer

true

Question 28

Magnetic and optical storage are currently direct competitors.

Answer

true

Question 29

The write operation for recordable discs is destructive, so recordable disc formats can be written only one time.

Answer

true

Question 30

Magneto-optical technology peaked in the mid-1980s.

Answer

true

Question 31

A system bus connects computer system components, including the CPU, memory, storage, and I/O devices.

Answer

true

Question 32

A system bus can be conceptually or physically divided into specialized subsets, including the data, address, control, and power buses.

Answer

true

Question 33

With serial communication lines in a bus, each line carries only one bit value or signal at a time, and many lines are required to carry data, address, and control bits.

Answer

true

Question 34

Until the 2000s, system buses were always constructed with serial electrical lines.

Answer

true

Question 35

Serial channels in buses are more reliable than parallel channels at very high speeds.

Answer

true

Question 36

Performance is improved if storage and I/O devices can transmit data between themselves with explicit CPU involvement.

Answer

true

Question 37

Peer-to-peer bus protocols are substantially less complex but more expensive than master-slave bus protocols.

Answer

true

Question 38

The memory bus has a much higher data transfer rate than the system bus because of its shorter length, higher clock rate, and (in most computers) large number of parallel communication lines.

Answer

true

Question 39

Secondary storage devices are much faster than the system bus.

Answer

true

Question 40

Devices with low data transfer demand can use a single PCI bus lane, and devices with higher requirements can increase their available data transfer rate by using additional lanes.

Answer

true

Question 41

The CPU communicates with a peripheral device by moving data to or from an I/O port’s dedicated bus.

Answer

true

Question 42

A PC usually transmits data one bit at a time over a wireless connection, and a laser printer prints an entire page at once.

Answer

true

Question 43

A buffer for an I/O device is typically implemented on the sending computer.

Answer

true

Question 44

During a write operation, a cache acts similarly to a buffer.

Answer

true

Question 45

Data written to a cache during a write operation isn’t automatically removed from the cache after it’s written to the underlying storage device.

Answer

true

Question 46

One way to limit wait states is to use an SDRAM cache between the CPU and SRAM primary storage.

Answer

true

Question 47

Disk caching is common in modern computer systems, particularly in file and database servers.

Answer

true

Question 48

The OS is the best source of file access information because it updates information dynamically as it services file access requests.

Answer

true

Question 49

A full-featured 64-bit CPU, even one with multiple ALUs and pipelined processing, typically requires fewer than 50 million transistors.

Answer

true

Question 50

When multiple processors occupy a single motherboard, they share primary storage and a single system bus.

Answer

true

Question 51

Multiple-processor architecture is not common in workstations.

Answer

true

Question 52

Both multicore and multiple-processor architectures are examples of scaling up because they increase the power of a single computer system.

Answer

true

Question 53

Until the 1990s, scaling up was almost always a more cost-effective strategy to increase available computer power because communication between computers was extremely slow compared with communication between a single computer’s components.

Answer

true

Question 54

The largest computational problems, such as those encountered in modeling three-dimensional physical phenomena, can be solved by a single computer as long as it has enough computing resources.

Answer

true

Question 55

People routinely download megabytes or gigabytes of data via the Internet and store gigabytes of data on handheld devices, terabytes on desktop computers, and petabytes to exabytes in corporate and government data centers.

Answer

true

Question 56

Reducing the size of stored or transmitted data can improve performance whenever there’s a dearth of processing power.

Answer

true

Question 57

Zip files and archives are examples of lossless compression.

Answer

true

Question 58

Lossless compression ratios higher than 50:1 are difficult or impossible to achieve with audio and video data.

Answer

true

Question 59

Using data compression alters the balance of processor resources and communication or storage resources in a computer system.

Answer

true

Question 60

MP3 compresses the audio data stream by discarding information about masked sounds or representing them with fewer bits.

Answer

true

Question 61

For video display, a pixel displays no light or light of a specific color and intensity.

Answer

true

Question 62

Image quality improves as dots per inch increases.

Answer

true

Question 63

Image quality improves as pixel size increases.

Answer

true

Question 64

On paper, pixel size corresponds to the smallest drop of ink that can be placed accurately on the page.

Answer

true

Systems Software & Architecture Final Exam Study Guide

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