This video will look at some of the considerations that you should consider before installing mass storage devices. In your IT career, you will often be installing or replacing storage in a computer, so it is important to understand what things need to be considered. Download PowerPoint: https://itfreetraining.com/handouts/ap/3b50.pptx Form Factor The first thing to consider before installing mass storage is the form factor. The form factor will determine what connection and hardware you will need in order to use the storage. Although there are a lot of different kinds of storage, nowadays, they generally fall under three different types – these being, M.2, SATA and SAS. In order to install additional mass storage in your computer, you will need to ensure that your computer supports the storage and has a compatible place to install it. In the case of M.2, this will be used by Solid-State Drives and is currently not used for hard disks. This is unlikely to change any time soon. Although there are a lot of different standards for M.2, there are two different standards for M.2 Solid-State Drives currently on the market. Each type is keyed differently to prevent it being installed in a device that does not support it. If I have a closer look at the M.2 storage on the left, you will notice that it has two notches taken out of the board. Although it is possible to have others, motherboards and devices currently on the market support either B-Key or M-Key. The other keys are generally used for other devices, for example wireless cards. For a B-Key device, the notch will be on the left side. For an M-Key device, the notch will be on the right. You will find that currently on the market, B-Key storage devices will also be M-Key. This means they can be put in motherboards that use either B-Key or M-Key connectors. M.2 storage that uses B-key, this includes B + M Key storage devices, will use the SATA protocol to access the storage on the device. Thus, check the M.2 connector on your motherboards supports the storage that you are trying to install. B + M key is done for compatibility and, like most things done for compatibility reasons, will reduce the maximum connection speed the M.2 connector can achieve. For this reason, for the best performance, you always want to get an M-Key Solid-State Storage Drive if your device supports M-Key. M.2 is used for Solid-State devices, but not for hard disks. In the case of hard disks, nowadays, they will either use SATA or SAS. In the case of this example, the SATA storage device is a Solid-State Drive. Therefore, SATA or SAS can support hard disks or Solid-State Drives. We are generally seeing a trend where smaller storage devices will be Solid-State Drives to get better performance and when more space is required hard disks are used. SATA is used in the home and business markets. You will only see SAS drives in high-performance servers and large storage environments like cloud storage. SAS is compatible with SATA; however, SATA won’t work with SAS. I will now have a closer look at the connections for SAS and SATA. In this example, I have a SAS and SATA hard disk. I placed one on top of the other so we can compare the connection type. The SAS drive is on the top. You will notice that both connections appear to be exactly the same. In a lot of ways they are, as they use the same number of pins for the data and power connectors. It is hard to see, but there is a gap between the power and data on the SATA connection. By contrast, the SAS connection is blocked. This prevents a SATA cable being plugged into a SAS drive; however, since SAS is compatible with SATA, a SAS cable can be plugged into a SATA drive. In order to use a SAS drive, generally you will have a special cable or enclosure. So, your connection may look different. Once you remove the device from the enclosure, you should find that the connection to the storage will look like the one shown, unless it is a specialized device designed to work in a particular device like RAID storage. I will look at RAID in another video, but for this video, just understand that RAID allows a lot of storage devices to be combined into one logical storage device. Internal VS External Storage Description too long for YouTube. Please see the following link for the rest of the description. https://itfreetraining.com/ap/3b50 References “The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1001)” Chapter 6 Paragraph 172-188 “Picture: Circuit board” https://pixabay.com/illustrations/circuit-board-pattern-background-5907811/ Credits Trainer: Austin Mason http://ITFreeTraining.com/ Voice Talent: HP Lewis http://hplewis.com/ Quality Assurance: Brett Batson http://www.pbb-proofreading.uk/