Mass Storage Structure overview




Overview of Mass-Storage

Structure In this section we present a general overview of the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage devices.

Magnetic Disks

Magnetic disks provide the bulk of secondary storage for modern computer systems. Conceptually, disks are relatively simple (Figure 12.1). Each disk platter has a flat circular shape, like a CD. Common platter diameters range from 1.8 to 5.25 inches. The two surfaces of a platter are covered with a magnetic material. We store information by recording it magnetically on the platters.

Mass Storage Structure overview

A read-write head "flies" just above each surface of every platter. The heads are attached to a disk arm that moves all the heads as a unit. The surface of a platter is logically divided into circular tracks, which are subdivided into sectors. The set of tracks that are at one arm position makes up a cylinder. There may be thousands of concentric cylinders in a disk drive, and each track may contain hundreds of sectors. The storage capacity of common disk drives is measured in gigabytes.

When the disk is in use, a drive motor spins it at high speed. Most drives rotate 60 to 200 times per second. Disk speed has two parts. The transfer rate is the rate at which data flow between the drive and the computer. The positioning time, sometimes called the random-access time, consists of the time to move the disk arm to the desired cylinder, called the seek time, and the time for the desired sector to rotate to the disk head, called the rotational latency.

Typical disks can transfer several megabytes of data per second, and they have seek times and rotational latencies of several milliseconds. Because the disk head flies on an extremely thin cushion of air (measured in microns), there is a danger that the head will make contact with the disk surface. Although the disk platters are coated with a thin protective layer, sometimes the head will damage the magnetic surface. This accident is called a head crash.

A head crash normally cannot be repaired; the entire disk must be replaced. A disk can be removable, allowing different disks to be mounted as needed. Removable magnetic disks generally consist of one platter, held in a plastic case to prevent damage while not in the disk drive. Floppy disks are inexpensive removable magnetic disks that have a soft plastic case containing a flexible platter. The head of a floppy-disk drive generally sits directly on the disk surface, so the drive is designed to rotate more slowly than a hard-disk drive to reduce the wear on the disk surface.

The storage capacity of a floppy disk is typically only 1.44 MB or so. Removable disks are available that work much like normal hard disks and have capacities measured in gigabytes. A disk drive is attached to a computer by a set of wires called an I/O bus. Several kinds of buses are available, including enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE), advanced technology attachment (ATA), serial ATA (SATA), universal serial bus (USB), fiber channel (FC), and SCSI buses. The data transfers on a bus are carried out by special electronic processors called controllers. The host controller is the controller at the computer end of the bus. A disk controller is built into each disk drive. To perform a disk I/O operation, the computer places a command into the host controller, typically using memory-mapped I/O ports, as described in Section 9.7.3. The host controller then sends the command via messages to the disk controller, and the disk controller operates the disk-drive hardware to carry out the command. Disk controllers usually have a built-in cache. Data transfer at the disk drive happens between the cache and the disk surface, and data transfer to the host, at fast electronic speeds, occurs betwr een the cache and the host controller.

Mass Storage Structure overview

Magnetic Tapes

Magnetic tape was used as an early secondary-storage medium. Although it is relatively permanent and can hold large quantities of data, its access time is slow compared with that of main memory and magnetic disk. In addition, random access to magnetic tape is about a thousand times slower than random access to magnetic disk, so tapes are not very useful for secondary storage. Tapes are used mainly for backup, for storage of infrequently used information, and as a medium for transferring information from one system to another.

 A tape is kept in a spool and is wound or rewound past a read-write head. Moving to the correct spot on a tape can take minutes, but once positioned, tape drives can write data at speeds comparable to disk drives. Tape capacities vary greatly, depending on the particular kind of tape drive. Typically, they store from 20 GB to 200 GB. Some have built-in compression that can more than double the effective storage. Tapes and their drivers are usually categorized by width, including 4, 8, and 19 millimeters and 1/4 and 1/2 inch. Some are named according to technology, such as LTO-2 and SDLT. Tape storage is further described in Section 12.9.

Mass Storage Structure overview



Frequently Asked Questions

+
Ans: We turn next to a description of the scheduling policies of the Solaris, Windows XP, and Linux operating systems. It is important to remember that we are describing the scheduling of kernel threads with Solaris and Linux. Recall that Linux does not distinguish between processes and threads; thus, we use the term task when discussing the Linux scheduler. view more..
+
Ans: When a process running in user mode requests additional memory, pages are allocated from the list of free page frames maintained by the kernel. This list is typically populated using a page-replacement algorithm such as those discussed in Section 9.4 and most likely contains free pages scattered throughout physical memory, as explained earlier. Remember, too, that if a user process requests a single byte of memory, internal fragmentation will result, as the process will be granted, an entire page frame. Kernel memory, however, is often allocated from a free-memory pool different from the list used to satisfy ordinary user-mode processes. view more..
+
Ans: Thrashing If the number of frames allocated to a low-priority process falls below the minimum number required by the computer architecture, we must suspend, that process's execution. We should then page out its remaining pages, freeing all its allocated frames. This provision introduces a swap-in, swap-out level of intermediate CPU scheduling. In fact, look at any process that does not have ''enough" frames. If the process does not have the number of frames it needs to support pages in active use, it will quickly page-fault. At this point, it must replace some page. However, since all its pages are in active use, it must replace a page that will be needed again right away. Consequently, it quickly faults again, and again, and again, replacing pages that it must bring back in immediately. This high paging activity is called thrashing. A process is thrashing if it is spending more time paging than executing. view more..
+
Ans: Overview of Mass-Storage Structure In this section we present a general overview of the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage devices view more..
+
Ans: Allocation of Frames We turn next to the issue of allocation. How do we allocate the fixed amount of free memory among the various processes? If we have 93 free frames and two processes, how many frames does each process get? The simplest case is the single-user system. Consider a single-user system with 128 KB of memory composed of pages 1 KB in size. This system has 128 frames. The operating system may take 35 KB, leaving 93 frames for the user process. Under pure demand paging, all 93 frames would initially be put on the free-frame list. When a user process started execution, it would generate a sequence of page faults. The first 93 page faults would all get free frames from the free-frame list. view more..
+
Ans: The direct-access nature of disks allows us flexibility in the implementation of files, in almost every case, many files are stored on the same disk. The main problem is how to allocate space to these files so that disk space is utilized effectively and files can be accessed quickly. Three major methods of allocating disk space are in wide use: contiguous, linked, and indexed. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Some systems (such as Data General's RDOS for its Nova line of computers) support all three. view more..
+
Ans: Free-Space Management Since disk space is limited, we need to reuse the space from deleted files for new files, if possible. (Write-once optical disks only allow one write to any given sector, and thus such reuse is not physically possible.) To keep track of free disk space, the system maintains a free-space list. The free-space list records all free disk blocks—those not allocated to some file or directory. To create a file, we search the free-space list for the required amount of space and allocate that space to the new file. This space is then removed from the free-space list. view more..
+
Ans: File Concept Computers can store information on various storage media, such as magnetic disks, magnetic tapes, and optical disks. So that the computer system will be convenient to use, the operating system provides a uniform logical view of information storage. The operating system abstracts from the physical properties of its storage devices to define a logical storage unit, the file. Files are mapped by the operating system onto physical devices. These storage devices are usually nonvolatile, so the contents are persistent through power failures and system reboots. view more..
+
Ans: Modern disk drives are addressed as large one-dimensional arrays of logical blocks, where the logical block is the smallest unit of transfer. The size of a logical block is usually 512 bytes, although some disks can be low-level formatted to have a different logical block size, such as 1,024 bytes. view more..
+
Ans: In the previous sections, we explored the motivation for file sharing and some of the difficulties involved in allowing users to share files. Such file sharing is very desirable for users who want to collaborate and to reduce the effort required to achieve a computing goal. Therefore, user-oriented operating systems must accommodate the need to share files in spite of the inherent difficulties. In this section, we examine more aspects of file sharing view more..
+
Ans: When information is stored in a computer system, we want to keep it safe from physical damage (reliability) and improper access (protection). Reliability is generally provided by duplicate copies of files. Many computers have systems programs that automatically (or through computer-operator intervention) copy disk files to tape at regular intervals (once per day or week or month) to maintain a copy should a file system be accidentally destroyed. view more..
+
Ans: Goal of systems analysis and design is to improve organizational systems. This process involves developing or acquiring application software and training employees. view more..
+
Ans: Disk Scheduling One of the responsibilities of the operating system is to use the hardware efficiently. For the disk drives, meeting this responsibility entails having fast access time and large disk bandwidth. The access time has two major components. The seek time is the time for the disk arm to move the heads to the cylinder containing the desired sector. The rotational latency is the additional time for the disk to rotate the desired sector to the disk head. The disk bandwidth is the total number of bytes transferred, divided by the total time between the first request for service and the completion of the last transfer. We can improve both the access time and the bandwidth by scheduling the servicing of disk I/O requests in a good order. Whenever a process needs I/O to or from the disk, it issues a system call to the operating system view more..
+
Ans: The operating system is responsible for several other aspects of disk management, too. Here we discuss disk initialization, booting from disk, and bad-block recovery. view more..
+
Ans: File-System Structure Disks provide the bulk of secondary storage on which a file system is maintained. They have two characteristics that make them a convenient medium for storing multiple files: 1. A disk can be rewritten in place; it is possible to read a block from the disk, modify the block, and write it back into the same place. 2. A disk can access directly any given block of information it contains. Thus, it is simple to access any file either sequentially or randomly, and switching from one file to another requires only moving the read-write heads and waiting for the disk to rotate. view more..
+
Ans: An operating system provides an environment for the execution of programs. It provides certain services to programs and to the users of those programs. The specific services provided, of course, differ from one operating system to another, but we can identify common classes. These operating-system services are provided for the convenience of the programmer, to make the programming task easier. services are : User interface, Program execution, I/O operations, File-system manipulation, Communications, Error detection, Resource allocation, Accounting, Protection and security view more..
+
Ans: User Operating-System Interface There are two fundamental approaches for users to interface with the operating system. One technique is to provide a command-line interface or command interpreter that allows users to directly enter commands that are to be performed by the operating system. The second approach allows the user to interface with the operating system via a graphical user interface or GUI. view more..
+
Ans: Operating-System Design and Implementation In this section, we discuss problems we face in designing and implementing an operating system. There are, of course, no complete solutions to such problems, but there are approaches that have proved successful. view more..




Rating - 4/5
504 views

Advertisements