Chapter 10: Mass-Storage

Systems

Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018

 Chapter 11: Outline

■ Overview of Mass Storage Structure

■ HDD Scheduling

■ NVM Scheduling

■ Error Detection and Correction

■ Storage Device Management

■ Swap-Space Management

■ Storage Attachment

■ RAID Structure

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 Objectives

■ Describe the physical structure of secondary storage devices and the

effect of a device’s structure on its uses

■ Explain the performance characteristics of mass-storage devices

■ Evaluate I/O scheduling algorithms

■ Discuss operating-system services provided for mass storage,

including RAID

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 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
● Disks can be removable
● Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface
4 That’s bad

■ Performance
● Drive rotation is 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)

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 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

track t spindle

arm assembly
sector s

cylinder c read-write
head

platter
arm

rotation

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 Example of Hard Disk Drives

■ Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)

● Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”

■ Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive

■ Performance

● Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec

4 Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec

● Seek time from 3ms to 12ms (e.g., 9ms is common for desktop drives)

4 Average seek time is measured or calculated based on 1/3 of tracks

● Latency based on spindle speed

4 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM

4 Average latency = ½ latency

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 Hard Disk Performance

■ Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time +

average rotational latency
● For fastest disk: 3ms + 2ms = 5ms

● For slow disk: 9ms + 5.56ms = 14.56ms

■ Average I/O time = average access time + (amount to transfer /

transfer rate) + controller overhead

■ For example, to transfer a 4KB block on a 7200 RPM disk with a 5ms
average seek time, 1Gb/sec transfer rate with a 0.1ms controller
overhead, the average I/O time for 4KB block is
● = 5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time
4 Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s * 8Gb / GB * 1GB / 10242KB = 32 / (10242) =
0.031 ms
● = 9.27ms + 0.031ms = 9.301ms

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 The First Commercial Disk Drive

■ 1956

■ IBM RAMDAC
computer included
the IBM Model 350
disk storage system

■ 5M (7 bit) characters

■ 50 x 24” platters

■ Access time < 1

second

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 Nonvolatile Memory Devices

■ If disk-drive like, then called solid-state disks (SSDs)

■ Other forms include USB drives (thumb drive, flash drive), DRAM disk
replacements, surface-mounted on motherboards, and main storage
in devices like smartphones
● Busses can be too slow –> connect directly to PCIe for example

● No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency

● Can be more reliable than HDDs

● More expensive per MB

● Maybe have shorter life span – need careful management

● Less capacity

● But much faster

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 Nonvolatile Memory Devices (Cont.)

■ Have characteristics that present challenges

■ Read and written in “page” increments (think sector) but can’t

overwrite in place
● Must first be erased, and erases happen in larger ”block” increments

● Can only be erased a limited number of times before worn out ~ 100,000

● Life span measured in drive writes per day (DWPD)

■ E.g., A 1TB NAND drive with

rating of 5DWPD is expected to
have 5TB per day written within
warrantee period without failing

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 NAND Flash Controller Algorithms

■ With no overwrite, pages end up with mix of valid and invalid data

■ To track which logical blocks are valid, controller maintains flash

translation layer (FTL) table

■ Also implements garbage collection (GC) to free invalid page space

■ Allocates overprovisioning to provide working space for GC

■ Each cell has lifespan, so wear leveling needed to write equally to all
cells

NAND block with valid and invalid pages

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 Volatile Memory

■ DRAM frequently used as mass-storage device

● Not technically secondary storage because volatile, but can have file
systems, be used like very fast secondary storage
■ RAM drives (with many names, including RAM disks) present as raw
block devices, commonly file system formatted
● Found in all major operating systems
4 Linux /dev/ram, macOS diskutil to create them, Solaris /tmp of file system type
tmpfs
● Computers have buffering, caching via RAM, so why RAM drives?
4 Caches / buffers allocated / managed by programmer, operating system,
hardware
4 RAM drives under user control
■ Used as high speed temporary storage
● Programs could share bulk date, quickly, by reading/writing to RAM drive

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 Magnetic Tape

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 Disk Attachment

■ Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O

busses. Several busses available, including advanced technology
attachment (ATA), serial ATA (SATA), eSATA, serial attached SCSI
(SAS), universal serial bus (USB), and fibre channel (FC)
● Because NVM much faster than HDD, new fast interface for NVM called
NVM express (NVMe), connecting directly to PCI bus
■ Data transfers on a bus carried out by special electronic processors
called controllers (or host-bus adapters, HBAs)
● Host controller on the computer end of the bus, device controller on
device end
● Computer places command on host controller, using memory-mapped
I/O ports
● Host controller sends messages to device controller
● Data transferred via DMA between device and computer DRAM

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 Address Mapping

■ 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 should be easy

4 Except for bad sectors
4 Non-constant # of sectors per track via constant angular velocity

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 HDD Scheduling

■ The operating system is responsible for using hardware efficiently —

for the disk drives, this means having a fast access time and disk
bandwidth

● 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

■ Minimize seek time

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 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)

■ There are many sources of disk I/O request

● OS
● System processes
● Users processes
■ 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 work
must queue
● Optimization algorithms only make sense when a queue exists
● In the past, operating system responsible for queue management, disk
drive head scheduling
4 Now, built into the storage devices, controllers
● Just provide LBAs, handle sorting of requests
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 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

■ The analysis is true for one or many platters

■ E.g., We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

● 98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

● Head pointer –> 53

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 First Come First Served (FCFS)

■ Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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 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 uniformly dense, largest density at other
end of disk and those wait the longest

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 SCAN (Cont.)

■ Illustration shows total head movement of 208 cylinders

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 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

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 C-SCAN (Cont.)

■ Total number of cylinders?

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 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm

■ FCFS 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, but still possible)
■ To avoid starvation Linux implements deadline scheduler
● Maintains separate read and write queues, gives read priority
4 Because processes more likely to block on read than write
● Implements four queues: 2 x read and 2 x write
4 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in LBA order, (implementing C-SCAN)
4 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in FCFS order
4 All I/O requests sent in batch sorted in that queue’s order
4 After each batch, checks if any requests in FCFS older than configured age
(default 500ms)
– If so, LBA queue containing that request is selected for next batch of I/O

● In RHEL 7, NOOP and completely fair queueing scheduler (CFQ) are

also available, defaults vary by storage device
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 NVM Scheduling

■ No disk heads or rotational latency but still room for optimization

■ In RHEL 7, NOOP (no scheduling) is used but adjacent LBA requests

are combined
● NVM best at random I/O, HDD at sequential

● Throughput can be similar

● Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) much higher with NVM

(hundreds of thousands vs hundreds)

● But write amplification (one write, causing garbage collection and many
read/writes) can decrease the performance advantage

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 Error Detection and Correction

■ Fundamental aspect of many parts of computing (memory,

networking, storage)
■ Error detection determines if there a problem has occurred (for
example a bit flipping)
● If detected, can halt the operation
● Detection frequently done via parity bit
● Parity – one form of checksum – uses modular arithmetic to compute,
store, compare values of fixed-length words
● Another error-detection method common in networking is Cyclic
Redundancy Check (CRC) which uses hash function to detect multiple-bit
errors
■ Error-correction code (ECC) not only detects, but can correct some
errors
● Soft errors correctable, hard errors detected but not corrected

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 Storage Device 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)

● 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

4 Disk I/O done in blocks
4 File I/O done in clusters
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 Storage Device Management (cont.)

■ Root partition contains the OS, other partitions can hold other Oses,
other file systems, or be raw
● Mounted at boot time

● Other partitions can mount automatically or manually

■ At mount time, file system consistency checked

● Is all metadata correct?

4 If not, fix it, try again

4 If yes, add to mount table, allow access

■ Boot block can point to boot volume or boot loader set of blocks that
contain enough code to know how to load the kernel from the file
system
● Or a boot management program for multi-os booting
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 Device Storage Management (Cont.)

■ Raw disk access for apps

that want to do their own
block management, keep OS
out of the way (databases for
example)

■ Boot block initializes system

● The bootstrap is stored in

ROM, firmware

● Bootstrap loader program

stored in boot blocks of boot
partition
Booting from secondary storage
■ Methods such as sector in Windows
sparing used to handle bad
blocks
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 Swap-Space Management

■ Used for moving entire ● Secondary storage slower

processes (swapping), or pages than DRAM, so important to
(paging), from DRAM to optimize performance
secondary storage when DRAM ● Usually multiple swap spaces
not large enough for all possible – decreasing I/O load
processes on any given device

■ Operating system provides ● Best to have dedicated

swap space management devices

● Can be in raw partition or a file

within a file system (for
convenience of adding)

● Data structures for swapping

on Linux systems:

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 Storage Attachment

■ Computers access storage in three ways

● host-attached

● network-attached

● cloud

■ Host attached access through local I/O ports, using one of several
technologies
● To attach many devices, use storage busses such as USB, firewire,
thunderbolt

● High-end systems use fibre channel (FC)

4 High-speed serial architecture using fibre or copper cables

4 Multiple hosts and storage devices can connect to the FC fabric

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 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)

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 Cloud Storage

■ Similar to NAS, provides access to storage across a network

● Unlike NAS, accessed over the Internet or a WAN to remote data center

■ NAS presented as just another file system, while cloud storage is API
based, with programs using the APIs to provide access
● Examples include Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple
iCloud

● Use APIs because of latency and failure scenarios (NAS protocols

wouldn’t work well)

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 Storage Array

■ Can just attach disks, or arrays of disks

■ Avoids the NAS drawback of using network bandwidth

■ Storage Array has controller(s), provides features to attached host(s)

● Ports to connect hosts to array

● Memory, controlling software (sometimes NVRAM, etc)

● A few to thousands of disks

● RAID, hot spares, hot swap (discussed later)

● Shared storage -> more efficiency

● Features found in some file systems

4 Snaphots, clones, thin provisioning, replication, deduplication, etc

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 Storage Area Network

■ Common in large storage environments

■ Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays – flexible

client
server
client
storage LAN/WAN
array server
client

storage SAN
array data-processing
center

tape web content

library provider

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 Storage Area Network (Cont.)

■ SAN is one or more storage arrays

● Connected to one or more Fibre

Channel switches or InfiniBand (IB)
network

■ Hosts also attach to the switches

■ Storage made available via LUN

Masking from specific arrays
to specific servers

■ Easy to add or remove storage, add

new host and allocate it storage A Storage Array

■ Why have separate storage networks

and communications networks?
● Consider iSCSI, FCOE
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 RAID Structure

■ RAID – redundant array of inexpensive disks

● multiple disk drives provides reliability via redundancy
■ Increases the mean time to failure
■ Mean time to repair – exposure time when another failure could
cause data loss
■ Mean time to data loss based on above factors
■ If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with 1300,000 mean
time to failure and 10 hour mean time to repair
● Mean time to data loss is 100, 0002 / (2 ∗ 10) = 500 ∗ 106 hours, or
57,000 years!
■ Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve write performance
■ Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve the use of
multiple disks working cooperatively

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 RAID (Cont.)

■ Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage unit

■ RAID is arranged into six different levels

■ RAID schemes improve performance and improve the reliability of the

storage system by storing redundant data
● Mirroring or shadowing (RAID 1) keeps duplicate of each disk
● Striped mirrors (RAID 1+0) or mirrored stripes (RAID 0+1) provides high
performance and high reliability
● Block interleaved parity (RAID 4, 5, 6) uses much less redundancy

■ RAID within a storage array can still fail if the array fails, so automatic
replication of the data between arrays is common
■ Frequently, a small number of hot-spare disks are left unallocated,
automatically replacing a failed disk and having data rebuilt onto them

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 RAID Levels

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 RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)

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 Other Features

■ Regardless of where RAID implemented, other useful features can be

added

■ Snapshot is a view of file system before a set of changes take place

(i.e. at a point in time)
● More in Ch 12

■ Replication is automatic duplication of writes between separate sites

● For redundancy and disaster recovery

● Can be synchronous or asynchronous

■ Hot spare disk is unused, automatically used by RAID production if a

disk fails to replace the failed disk and rebuild the RAID set if possible
● Decreases mean time to repair

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 Extensions

■ RAID alone does not prevent or detect data

corruption or other errors, just disk failures

■ Solaris ZFS adds checksums of all data and

metadata
metadata block 1
■ Checksums kept with pointer to object, to detect if address 1 address 2
object is the right one and whether it changed checksum MB2 checksum

■ Can detect and correct data and metadata metadata block 2

corruption address address

checksum D1 checksum D2

■ ZFS also removes volumes, partitions

data 1 data 2
● Disks allocated in pools
ZFS checksums all
● Filesystems with a pool share that pool, use and
metadata and data
release space like malloc() and free() memory
allocate / release calls
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 Traditional and Pooled Storage

FS FS FS

volume volume volume

(a) Traditional volumes and file systems.

ZFS ZFS ZFS

storage pool

(b) ZFS and pooled storage.

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 Object Storage

■ General-purpose computing, file systems ■ Object storage

not sufficient for very large scale management software
like Hadoop file system
■ Another approach – start with a storage (HDFS) and Ceph
pool and place objects in it determine where to
● Object just a container of data store objects, manages
● No way to navigate the pool to find protection
objects (no directory structures, few ● Typically by storing N
services) copies, across N
● Computer-oriented, not user-oriented systems, in the object
storage cluster
■ Typical sequence
● Horizontally scalable
● Create an object within the pool, receive ● Content addressable,
an object ID unstructured
● Access object via that ID
● Delete object via that ID
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 Summary

■ Hard disk drives and nonvolatile memory devices are themajor

secondary storage I/O units on most computers. Modern secondary
storage is structured as large one-dimensional arrays of logical
blocks.

■ Drives of either type may be attached to a computer system in one of

three ways: (1) through the local I/O ports on the host computer, (2)
directly connected to motherboards, or (3) through a communications
network or storage network connection.

■ Requests for secondary storage I/O are generated by the file system
and by the virtual memory system. Each request specifies the
address on the device to be referenced in the form of a logical block
number.

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 Summary (Cont.)

■ Disk-scheduling algorithms can improve the effective bandwidth of

HDDs, the average response time, and the variance in response
time. Algorithms such as SCAN and C-SCAN are designed to make
such improvements through strategies for disk-queue ordering.
Performance of disks cheduling algorithms can vary greatly on hard
disks. In contrast, because solid-state disks have no moving parts,
performance varies little among scheduling algorithms, and quite
often a simple FCFS strategy is used.

■ Data storage and transmission are complex and frequently result in

errors. Error detection attempts to spot such problems to alert the
system for corrective action and to avoid error propagation. Error
correction can detect and repair problems, depending on the amount
of correction data available and the amount of data that was
corrupted.

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 Summary (Cont.)

■ Storage devices are partitioned into one or more chunks of space.

Each partition can hold a volume or be part of a multidevice volume.
File systems are created in volumes.

■ The operating system manages the storage device’s blocks. New

devices typically come pre-formatted. The device is partitioned, file
systems are created, and boot blocks are allocated to store the
system’s bootstrap program if the device will contain an operating
system. Finally, when a block or page is corrupted, the system must
have a way to lock out that block or to replace it logically with a spare.

■ An efficient swap space is a key to good performance in some

systems. Some systems dedicate a raw partition to swap space, and
others use a file within the file system instead. Still other systems
allow the user or system administrator to make the decision by
providing both options.

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 Summary (Cont.)

■ Because of the amount of storage required on large systems, and

because storage devices fail in various ways, secondary storage
devices are frequently made redundant via RAID algorithms. These
algorithms allow more than one drive to be used for a given operation
and allow continued operation and even automatic recovery in the
face of a drive failure. RAID algorithms are organized into different
levels; each level provides some combination of reliability and high
transfer rates.

■ Object storage is used for big data problems such as indexing the
Internet and cloud photo storage. Objects are self-defining collections
of data, addressed by object ID rather than file name. Typically it
uses replication for data protection, computes based on the data on
systems where a copy of the data exists, and is horizontally scalable
for vast capacity and easy expansion.

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 End of Chapter 11

Operating System Concepts Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018