MODULE 5

MASS STORAGE STRUCTURE

 Overview of mass storage structure
• Bulk of secondary storage for modern computers is hard disk drives
(HDDs) and nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices
• HDDs spin platters of magnetically-coated material under moving read-
write heads
• Drives rotate at 60 to 250 times per second
• Transfer rate is rate at which data flow between drive and computer
• Positioning time (random-access time) is time to move disk arm to desired
cylinder (seek time) and time for desired sector to rotate under the disk head
(rotational latency)
• Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface --
That’s bad
• Disks can be removable
Moving-head Disk Mechanism

Drive attached to computer via I/O bus

• Busses vary, including EIDE,
ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre
Channel, SCSI, SAS, Firewire

Host controller in computer uses bus

to talk to disk controller built into
drive or storage array
 Hard Disk Drives
• Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)
• Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”
• Storage Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive
• Most drives rotate 60 to 200 times per second
• Performance
• Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec
• Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec
• Seek time from 3ms to 12ms – 9ms
common for desktop drives
• Average seek time measured or calculated
based on 1/3 of tracks
Magnetic Tape
• Was early secondary-storage medium
• It is permanent storage device and holds large quantities of data
• Access time slow
• Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
• Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used data, transfer
medium between systems
• Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write head – seek time
will be several minutes.
• Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
• 140MB/sec and greater
• 200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
Disk Structure
• Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays of logical blocks,
where the logical block is the smallest unit of transfer
• Low-level formatting creates logical blocks on physical media
• The 1-dimensional array of logical blocks is mapped into the sectors of the
disk sequentially
• Sector 0 is the first sector of the first track on the outermost cylinder
• Mapping proceeds in order through that track, then the rest of the tracks in that
cylinder, and then through the rest of the cylinders from outermost to innermost
• Logical to physical address mapping is easy:
• Except for bad sectors-> sparse sectors
• Number of sector per track is not constant => media will be using constant linear
velocity(CLV) and constant angular velocity(CAV)
 Disk Attachment
• Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O busses
• I/O ports connect 2 drives.
• I/O directed to bus ID, device ID, logical unit (LUN)
• SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one cable, SCSI initiator requests
operation and SCSI targets perform tasks
• Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks attached to device controller)
• FC is high-speed serial architecture
• Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space – the basis of storage area networks
(SANs) in which many hosts attach to many storage units
Network-Attached Storage
• Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made available over a network rather than over a
local connection (such as a bus)
• Remotely attaching to file systems
• NFS and CIFS are common protocols
• Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs) between host and storage over typically
TCP or UDP on IP network
• iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI protocol
• Remotely attaching to devices (blocks)
Storage Area Network
• Common in large storage environments
• Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays(array of disk) – flexible
• Storage array can just be attached to the server when it is running low
Disk Scheduling
• The operating system is responsible for using hardware efficiently — for the
disk drives, this means having a fast access time and disk bandwidth
• Fast access time => Minimize seek time(Seek time  seek distance)
• 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
• System call will be issued for the I/O request.
• I/O request includes input or output mode, disk address, memory address,
number of sectors to transfer
• OS maintains queue of requests, per disk or device
• Idle disk can immediately work on I/O request, busy disk means request must
be queue
Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
• Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can manage a queue of I/O
requests (of varying “depth”)
• Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of disk I/O requests
• We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

Head pointer 53
FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders
 SSTF
• Shortest Seek Time First selects the request with the minimum seek time from the current
head position
• SSTF scheduling is a form of SJF scheduling; may cause starvation of some requests
• Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders
SCAN
• The disk arm starts at one end of the disk, and moves toward the other end,
servicing requests until it gets to the other end of the disk, where the head
movement is reversed and servicing continues.
• SCAN algorithm Sometimes called the elevator algorithm
• But note that if requests are not uniformly dense, largest density at other end
of disk and those wait the longest
SCAN (Cont.)

Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders

 C-SCAN
• Provides a more uniform wait time than SCAN
• The head moves from one end of the disk to the other, servicing requests as it
goes
• When it reaches the other end, however, it immediately returns to the
beginning of the disk, without servicing any requests on the return trip
• Treats the cylinders as a circular list that wraps around from the last cylinder
to the first one
C-SCAN (Cont.)

Total number of head movement-382 cylinders

C-LOOK
• LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a version of C-SCAN
• Arm only goes as far as the last request in each direction, then reverses
direction immediately, without first going all the way to the end of the
disk
• LOOK – When moving in reverse directing it serves the requests.
• C-LOOK – When moving in reverse direction it wont serves the request.
C-LOOK (Cont.)

Total number of head movement-322 cylinders

Suppose that a disk drive has 5,000 cylinders, numbered 0 to 4999. The drive is currently serving a
request at cylinder 143, and the previous request was at cylinder 125.
The queue of pending requests, in FIFO order, is: 86,1470, 913, 1774, 948, 1509, 1022,1750,130

Starting from the current head position, what is the total distance (in cylinders) that the disk arm
moves to satisfy all the pending requests for each of the following disk-scheduling algorithms?

a. FCFS
b. SSTF
c. SCAN
d. LOOK
e. C-SCAN
f. C-LOOK
Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm

• SSTF is common and has a natural appeal

• SCAN and C-SCAN perform better for systems that place a heavy load on the disk
• Less starvation
• Performance depends on the number and types of requests
• Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation method and metadata
layout(directory location on drive)
• The disk-scheduling algorithm should be written as a separate module of the operating
system, allowing it to be replaced with a different algorithm if necessary
• Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm.
• As OS sends batch of requests to the controller, the controller can queue then and then
schedule them to improve both the seek time and the rational latency.
Disk Management
➢Disk Management:
• Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a disk into sectors that the
disk controller can read and write
• Each sector can hold header information, plus data, plus error correction code
(ECC – used for validating the data present in data block)
• Usually 512 bytes of data but can be selectable
• To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to record its own data
structures on the disk
• Partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders, each treated as a logical
disk
• Logical formatting or “making a file system”
• To increase efficiency most file systems group blocks into clusters
• Disk I/O done in blocks
• File I/O done in clusters
 Disk Management (Cont.)
➢ Boot Block
• Boot block initializes system
• The bootstrap loader is stored in ROM
• Bootstrap program stored in boot blocks of boot partition

➢ Bad Blocks
Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad blocks
A typical bad-sector transaction might be as follows:
• The operating system tries to read logical block 87.
• The controller calculates the ECC and finds that the sector is bad. It reports this finding to the operating
system.
• The next time the system is rebooted, a special, command is run to tell the SCSI controller to replace the bad
sector with a spare.
• After that, whenever the system requests logical block 87, the request is translated into the replacement sector's
address by the controller
Swap-Space Management
• Swap-space — Virtual memory uses disk space as an extension of main memory
• Swap-space can be carved out of the normal file system, or, more commonly, it can be in a separate disk
partition (raw)
• Swap-space management
• 4.3BSD(Solaris 1) allocates swap space when process starts; holds text segment (the program) and
data segment
• Solaris 2 allocates swap space only when a dirty page is forced out of physical memory, not when
the virtual memory page is first created
• Linux uses swap maps to track swap-space use -> swap space is implemented as swap space area.
• Some systems allow multiple swap spaces