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part6-3

The document discusses external memory types, including magnetic disks, RAID configurations, solid-state drives (SSDs), and optical memory. It explains data organization on disks, the advantages of RAID for data redundancy, and compares SSDs to traditional hard disk drives. Additionally, it covers optical memory technologies like CDs and DVDs, highlighting their storage capacities and data retrieval methods.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
5 views10 pages

part6-3

The document discusses external memory types, including magnetic disks, RAID configurations, solid-state drives (SSDs), and optical memory. It explains data organization on disks, the advantages of RAID for data redundancy, and compares SSDs to traditional hard disk drives. Additionally, it covers optical memory technologies like CDs and DVDs, highlighting their storage capacities and data retrieval methods.

Uploaded by

sezokius
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PART 6 External Memory

6.1 Magnetic Disk


A disk is a circular platter constructed of nonmagnetic material, called the substrate, coated
with a magnetizable material. Traditionally, the substrate has been an aluminum or aluminum
alloy material. More recently, glass substrates have been introduced.

6.1.1 Data Organization and Formatting


Data are recorded on and later retrieved from the disk via a conducting coil named the head; in
many systems, there are two heads, a read head and a write head. During a read or write
operation, the head is stationary while the platter rotates beneath it.
The head is a relatively small device capable of reading from or writing to a portion of the platter
rotating beneath it. This gives rise to the organization of data on the platter in a concentric set of
rings, called tracks. Each track is the same width as the head. There are thousands of tracks per
surface.
Figure 6.1 depicts this data layout. Adjacent tracks are separated by gaps. This prevents, or at
least minimizes, errors due to misalignment of the head or simply interference of magnetic fields.

Figure 6.1 Disk Data Layout

Data are transferred to and from the disk in sectors. There are typically hundreds of sectors per
track, and these may be of either fixed or variable length. To avoid imposing unreasonable
precision requirements on the system, adjacent sectors are separated by intratrack (intersector)
gaps.
A bit near the center of a rotating disk travels past a fixed point slower than a bit on the outside.
Therefore, some way must be found to compensate for the variation in speed so that the head can
read all the bits at the same rate:
constant angular velocity (CAV).This can be done by increasing the spacing between bits of
information recorded in segments of the disk. The information can then be scanned at the same
rate by rotating the disk at a fixed speed, as the Figure 6.2a shows the layout of a disk using
CAV. The disk is divided into a number of pie-shaped sectors and into a series of concentric
tracks.The advantage of using CAV is that individual blocks of data can be directly addressed by
track and sector. To move the head from its current location to a specific address, it only takes a
short movement of the head to a specific track and a short wait for the proper sector to spin under
the head. The disadvantage of CAV is that the amount of data that can be stored on the long outer
tracks is the only same as what can be stored on the short inner tracks

Figure 6.2 Comparison of Disk Layout Method

MZR(multiple zone recording ) :Figure 6.2b is a simplified layout, with 15 tracks organized
into 5 zones. The innermost two zones have two tracks each, with each track having nine sectors;
the next zone has 3 tracks, each with 12 sectors; and the outermost 2 zones have 4 tracks each,
with each track having 16 sectors.
Figure 6.3. shows the common sector formats used in contemporary hard disk drives. The
standard format used for many years divided the track into sectors, each containing 512 bytes of
data.

1. Gap: Separates sectors.


2. Sync: Indicates the beginning of the sector and provides timing alignment.
3. Address mark: Contains data to identify the sector’s number and location. It also provides
status about the sector itself.
4. Data: The 512 bytes of user data.
5. Error correction code (ECC): Used to correct data that might be damaged in the reading
and writing process

6.2 RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks)


RAID, or “Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks” is a technique which makes use of a
combination of multiple disks instead of using a single disk for increased performance, data
redundancy or both.
Why data redundancy?data redundancy, although taking up extra space, adds to disk
reliability. This means, in case of disk failure, if the same data is also backed up onto another
disk, we can retrieve the data and go on with the operation. On the other hand, if the data is
spread across just multiple disks without the RAID technique, the loss of a single disk can
affect the entire data.

 RAID 0 uses multiple disks and maps them as a single disk.This is mainly for performance
and not for fault tolerance.
 If any drive in RAID 0 fails whole system becomes unusable.
 There is no duplication of data. Hence, a block once lost cannot be recovered.

Figure 6.4 RAID-0

 It’s basically disk mirroring.it provides 100% redundancy as everything is stored in two disks
and if one disk fails we can restore data from backup disk and whole raid can be recreated.
 RAID 0 was unable to tolerate any disk failure. But RAID 1 is capable of reliability.
 1 disk failure can be handled for certain, because blocks of that disk would have duplicates
on some other disk.

Figure 6.5 RAID-1


 This configuration uses striping across disks, with some disks storing error checking and
correcting information.
 It has no advantage over RAID 3 and is no longer used.
 Figure 2. In RAID 2, data is split at the bit level over a number of data and ECC(error-
correcting code) disks. Every time data is written to the array, the Hamming codes are
calculated and written to the ECC disks. When the data is read from the array, these ECC
codes are read as well to confirm that no errors have occurred since the data was written. If
a single-bit error occurs, it can be corrected immediately.

Figure 6.6 RAID-2

RAID 3 is organized in a similar fashion to RAID 2.


 It uses striping at the byte level and stores dedicated parity bits on a separate disk drive.
 Instead of striping data blocks into different disks, RAID 3 stripes the bits, which are
stored on different disk drives. This configuration is used less commonly than other RAID
levels.
 The difference is that RAID 3 requires only a single redundant disk, no matter how large
the disk array.
 RAID 3 uses the more effective XOR algorithm to generate parity

Figure 6.7 RAID-3


stripes the data across multiple disks just like RAID 0. In addition to that, it also stores parity
information of all the disks in a separate dedicated disk to achieve redundancy. In the diagram
below, Disk 4 serves as the parity disk having parity blocks Ap, Bp, Cp and Dp. So, if one of the
disks fails, the data can be reconstructed using the parity information of that disk.

Figure 6.8 RAID-4


Consider an array of five drives in which X0 through X3 contain data and X4 is the parity disk.
Suppose that a write is performed that only involves a strip on disk X1. Initially, for each bit i, we
have the following relationship:
X4(i) = X3(i) ⊕ X2(i) ⊕ X1(i) ⊕ X0(i)
After the update, with potentially altered bits indicated by a prime symbol:
X4 ′ (i) = X4(i) ⊕ X1(i) ⊕ X1 ′ (i)
To calculate the new parity, the array management software must read the old user strip and the
old parity strip. Then it can update these two strips with the new data and the newly calculated
parity. Thus, each strip write involves two reads and two writes

RAID 5 is a data backup technology for hard disk drives that uses both disk striping and
parity, ALSO can be used for solid-state drives. It is one of the levels of RAID. RAID 5
doesn’t use disk mirroring, however; it combines disk striping and a data-checking technique
called parity. RAID 5 parity is spread among each drive, unlike RAID 4, which stores it all on
one disk. This provides added security (not all parity data is lost if that drive fails). Also, a
general note about disk drives is that the exact amount of room available on a disk may not be
what’s advertised, because formatting RAID configurations takes some of that space.

Figure 6.9 RAID-5


In the RAID 6 scheme, two different parity calculations are carried out and stored in separate
blocks on different disks. Thus, a RAID 6 array whose user data require N disks consists of N+2
disks. Figure 6.10 illustrates the scheme. P and Q are two different data check algorithms. One of
the two is the exclusive-OR calculation used in RAID 4 and 5. But the other is an independent
data check algorithm. This makes it possible to regenerate data even if two disks containing user
data fail.
that RAID 6 arrays will need to dedicate approximately two disks’ worth of data to parity,
because the amount of data stored in parity is about the storage size of two disks.

Figure 6.10 RAID-6

6.3 Solid State Drives


One of the most significant developments in computer architecture in recent years is the
increasing use of solid state drives (SSDs) to complement or even replace hard disk drives
(HDDs), both as internal and external secondary memory. The term solid state refers to electronic
circuitry built with semiconductors. An SSD is a memory device made with solid state
components that can be used as a replacement to a hard disk drive. The SSDs now on the market
and coming on line use NAND flash memory.
SSD Compared to HDD As the cost of flash-based SSDs has dropped and the performance and
bit density increased, SSDs have become increasingly competitive with HDDs.The SSDs have
the following advantages over HDDs:
 High-performance input/output operations per second (IOPS)
 Durability: Less susceptible to physical shock and vibration.
 Longer lifespan
 Lower power consumption
 Quieter and cooler running capabilities
 lower energy costs, and a greener enterprise

SSD Organization
Figure 6.11 illustrates a general view of the common architectural system component associated
with any SSD system.
 On the host system, the operating system invokes file system software to access data on
the disk.
 The file system, in turn, invokes I/O driver software.
 The I/O driver software provides host access to the particular SSD product.
The interface component in Figure 6.11 refers to the physical and electrical interface between
the host processor and the SSD peripheral device. If the device is an internal hard drive, a
common interface is PCIe. For external devices, one common interface is USB.
PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) is an interface standard for connecting high-
speed components. Every desktop PC motherboard has a number of PCIe slots you can use to
add GPUs (aka video cards aka graphics cards), RAID cards, Wi-Fi cards or SSD (solid-state
drive) add-on cards.

6.4 Optical Memory


Optical memory is an electronic storage medium that uses a laser beam to store and retrieve the
data. If we classify the memory system then optical memory comes under the external memory
in the computer system. Optical memory can be classified into many types.

6.4.1 Optical Disk Products

CDs or Compact Disks are opticL readable media. The main material of the CD is plastic.
The shape of the plastic is circular and one side of the circular plastic is coated with the
reflecting metal coating, usually aluminum. CDs can store many types of data, like audio,
video, games, any documents, etc. The data are scanned by a laser beam with a CD driver to
visualize the data. The storage capacity of a CD is 700 MB only.
The standard diameter of a CD is 120mm and thickness is 1.2mm. The main body of the CD is
made of hard plastic known as polycarbonate with a reflective metallic layer. This layer is
coated with metallic acrylic plastic. This metal is aluminum. In this layer, the data are stored
using the laser light which reflects the coated layer for reading and writing the data. The data is
read in the form of pits, each pit is of 0.83-micrometre and the data is arranged as spiral
track from the disc’s inner hole to its outer edge, because the CD is of circular shape.

Both the audio CD and the CD-ROM (compact disk read-only memory) share a similar
technology. The main difference is that CD-ROM players are more rugged and have error
correction devices to ensure that data are properly transferred from disk to computer. Both types
of disk are made the same way.
The disk is formed from a resin, such as polycarbonate. Digitally recorded information (either
music or computer data) is imprinted as a series of microscopic pits on the surface of the
polycarbonate., the disk contains a single spiral track, beginning near the center and spiraling out
to the outer edge of the disk. Sectors near the outside of the disk are the same length as those near
the inside. Thus, information is packed evenly across the disk in segments of the same size and
these are scanned at the same rate by rotating the disk at a variable speed. The pits are then read
by the laser at a constant linear velocity (CLV). The disk rotates more slowly for accesses near
the outer edge than for those near the center. Thus, the capacity of a track and the rotational delay
both increase for positions nearer the outer edge of the disk. The data capacity for a CD-ROM is
about 680 MB. Data on the CD-ROM are organized as a sequence of blocks. A typical block
format is shown in Figure 6.12 It consists of the following fields

Figure 6.12 CD-ROM Block Format


 Sync: The sync field identifies the beginning of a block.
 Header: The header contains the block address and the mode byte. Mode 0 specifies a
blank data field; mode 1 specifies the use of an error-correcting code and 2048 bytes of
data; mode 2 specifies 2336 bytes of user data with no error-correcting code
 Data: User data.
 Auxiliary: Additional user data in mode 2. In mode 1, this is a 288-byte error-correcting
code.

To accommodate applications in which only one or a small number of copies of a set of data is
needed, the write-once read-many CD, known as the CD recordable (CD-R), has been developed.
For CD-R, a disk is prepared in such a way that it can be subsequently written once with a laser
beam of modest intensity. Thus, with a somewhat more expensive disk controller than for CD-
ROM, the customer can write once as well as read the disk. The CD-R medium is similar but not
identical to that of a CD or CD-ROM. For CDs and CD-ROMs, information is recorded by the
pitting of the surface of the medium, which changes reflectivity. For a CD-R, the medium
includes a dye layer. The dye is used to change reflectivity and is activated by a high-intensity
laser. The resulting disk can be read on a CD-R drive or a CD-ROM drive

The CD-RW optical disk can be repeatedly written and overwritten, as with a magnetic disk.
Although a number of approaches have been tried, the only pure optical approach that has proved
attractive is called phase change. The phase change disk uses a material that has two significantly
different reflectivity's in two different phase states. A beam of laser light can change the material
from one phase to the other. The primary disadvantage of phase change optical disks is that the
material eventually and permanently loses its desirable properties. Current materials can be used
for between 500,000 and 1,000,000 erase cycles. The CD-RW has the obvious advantage over
CD-ROM and CD-R that it can be rewritten and thus used as a true secondary storage.

The DVD takes video into the digital age. It delivers movies with impressive picture quality, and
it can be randomly accessed like audio CDs, which DVD machines can also play. Vast volumes
of data can be crammed onto the disk, currently seven times as much as a CD-ROM. With DVD’s
huge storage capacity and vivid quality, PC games have become more realistic and educational
software incorporates more video. The DVD’s greater capacity is due to three differences from
CDs (Figure 6.13):
1. Bits are packed more closely on a DVD.
2. The DVD employs a second layer of pits and lands on top of the first layer.
3. The DVD-ROM can be two sided, whereas data are recorded on only one side of a
CD. This brings total capacity up to 17 GB

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