An I/O port used most often to connect a modem or a mouse to your computer. You can usually identify a serial port on your computer by its 9-pin
connector.

SIMD

Acronym for single instruction, multiple data.

shadowing

A computer's system and video BIOS code is usually stored on ROM chips. Shadowing refers to the performance-enhancement technique that
copies BIOS code to faster RAM chips in the upper memory area (above 640 KB) during the boot routine.

SMART

Acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. A technology that allows hard-disk drives to report errors and failures to the
system BIOS, which then displays an error message on the screen. To take advantage of this technology, you must have a SMART-compliant
hard-disk drive and the proper support in the system BIOS.

SMB

Abbreviation for system management bus.

SMP

Abbreviation for symmetric multiprocessing.

SNMP

Abbreviation for Simple Network Management Protocol.

striping

In composite drivers with two or more physical drives, the drive array subsystem uses a method of data storage called striping. With this method,
data is divided into a series of pieces called blocks and each data block is stored on a different physical drive. When each drive contains a block
of data, the process starts over with the first physical drive. When the size of the data block is carefully selected, the chance that the information
needed can be read from or written to multiple physical drives at once is increased, greatly increasing the performance of the composite drive.
See also

SRAM

Abbreviation for static random-access memory. Because SRAM chips do not require continual refreshing, they are substantially faster than DRAM
chips. SRAM is used mostly for external cache memory.

SVGA

Abbreviation for super video graphics array. See also

VGA