Applied Statistics and Probability for Engineers, 6th Edition

Discrete Random Variables and Probability Distributions

Chapter Outline

3-1 Discrete Random Variables

3-2 Probability Distributions and Probability Mass Functions

3-3 Cumulative Distribution Functions

3-4 Mean and Variance of a Discrete Random Variable

3-5 Discrete Uniform Distribution

3-6 Binomial Distribution

3-7 Geometric and Negative Binomial Distributions

3-8 Hypergeometric Distribution

3-9 Poisson Distribution

A redundant array of independent disks (RAID) uses multiple physical disk drives as one logical unit in a computer system. The array can increase performance and robustness to a disk failure. Data copies can be written simultaneously to multiple drives (known as mirroring) to provide immediate backup and the ability to recover from failures but with less storage capacity than would otherwise be available. Alternatively, to increase performance, the data can be distributed among multiple disks with only a fraction of the data on each one (known as striping). But a failure to even a single disk can lead to loss of data. An intermediate design is to distribute the source data along with additional data (known as parity data) across multiple disks. With the parity data, the source data can be recovered even with disk failures. In particular, a RAID 5 design uses striping ...