Hardware

Hardware is best described as a device that is physically connected to your computer or something that can be physically touched. A CD-ROM, Monitor, Printer, and video Card are all examples of computer hardware. Without any hardware your computer would not exist and software would have nothing to run on. The image to the right is of a webcam, an example of an external hardware peripheral that allows users to make basic videos, transmit videos of themselves over the Internet, and take pictures.
Short for Compact Disc-Read Only Memory, CD-ROM drives are CD players inside computers that can have speeds in the range from 1x and beyond, and have the capability of playing audio CDs and computer data CDs. Below is a picture of the front and back of a standard CD-ROM drive.
Interfaces
Below are the different types of Interfaces that allow a CD-ROM and other disc drives to connect to the computer.
IDE / ATA - One of the most commonly used interfaces used still today to connect disc drives to the computer.
Panasonic - Older proprietary interface.
Parallel - Interface used with old external CD-ROM drives.
PCMCIA (PC Card) - Interface sometimes used to connect external disc drives to laptop computers.
SATA - Quickly replacing IDE as the new standard to connect disc drives.
SCSI- It is highly recommended to get a card that matches the CD-ROM drive as some of the earlier drives had proprietary SCSI interfaces. Otherwise, a SCSI-2 card is recommended.
USB - Interface most commonly used to connect external disc drives.
CD-ROM transfer speeds
Below is the standard transfer rates and access times of the majority of CD-ROM drives. The below figures are averages you can expect to find on each speed of CD-ROM drive. These averages may be slower or faster than your CD-ROM drive and to where the CD-ROM is accessing the data from the CD-ROM. In general the higher this number is the faster the transfer rate or in the case of a disc burner the faster the write rate.
Drive speed---------------- Transfer rate (BPS) ---- Access time (ms)
Single-speed (1x) -------- 153,600------------------- 400
Double-speed (2x)-------- 307,200------------------- 300
Triple-speed (3x)--------- 460,800 -------------------200
Quad-speed (4x)---------- 614,400------------------ 150
Six-speed (6x) -------------921,600 ----------------- 150
Eight-speed (8x)----------- 1,228,800---------------- 100
Ten-speed (10x)----------- 1,536,000---------------- 100
Twelve-speed (12x)-------- 1,843,200 ----------------100
Sixteen-speed (16x) -------2,457,600 -----------------90
Eighteen-speed (18x) ------2,764,800 -----------------90
Twenty-four-speed (24x) - 3,686,400----------------- 90
Thirty-two-speed (32x)---- 4,915,200 -----------------85
One-hundred-speed (100x) --15,360,000 --------------80
CAV drives (12x - 24x) -------1,843,200 - 3,686,400--- 150-90

Monitor

Monitor1. Also called a video display terminal (VDT) a monitor is a video display screen and the hard shell that holds it. In its most common usage, monitor refers only to devices that contain no electronic equipment other than what is essentially needed to display and adjust the characteristics of an image.
Like most TVs, the computer monitor has a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) that is found inside the computer monitor as illustrated in the picture to the right. The CRT is the main component and most expensive part within your computer monitor.


Printers
An external hardware device responsible for taking computer data and generating a hard copy of that data. Printers are one of the most used peripherals on computers and are commonly used to print text, images, and/or photos. The image to the right is a visual example of the Lexmardk Z605 Inkjet printer and is an example of what a printer may look like.
Types of printers
DOT Matrix printer
Inkjet printer Laser Printer
Thermal Printer
LeD printer
Printer interfaces
Firewire
MPP-1150
Parllel port
SCSI
Serial Port
USB

Vedio Cards
Also known as a graphics card, video card, video board, or a video controller, a video adapter is an internal circuit board that allows a display device such as a monitor to display a picture from the computer. Today video cards are most commonly connected to the AGP slot or PCIe slot on the motherboard, however, can also be found on-board or in a PCI slot.
Above is an example image of the ATI Radeon 9600 AGP video card; most video cards today resemble the picture shown below. As can be seen in the above picture this video card has three connections, the standard
VGA connector,S-Video connector, and theDVI connector.