Chapter 11: Mass-Storage

Systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 11: Mass-Storage Systems

 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
• 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

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 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

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 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
• 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
• Latency based on spindle speed
 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
• Average latency = ½ latency

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 Hard Disk Performance
 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time +
average latency (milliseconds)
• 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 .1ms controller
overhead =
• 5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time =
• Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s * 8Gb / GB * 1GB / 10242KB = 32 /
(10242) = 0.031 ms
• Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 Can be more reliable than HDDs
 More expensive per MB
 Maybe have shorter life span – need careful management
 Less capacity
 But much faster
 Busses can be too slow -> connect directly to PCI for example
 No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Nonvolatile Memory Devices
 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)
 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 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
 Computers have buffering, caching via RAM, so why RAM drives?
• Caches / buffers allocated / managed by programmer, operating
system, hardware
• RAM drives under user control
• Found in all major operating systems
 Linux /dev/ram, macOS diskutil to create them, Linux
/tmp of file system type tmpfs
 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).
 Most common is SATA
 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

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 Except for bad sectors
 Non-constant # of sectors per track via constant angular
velocity

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 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

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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

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 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
 In the past, operating system responsible for queue
management, disk drive head scheduling
• Now, built into the storage devices, controllers
• Just provide Logical Block Addressing (LBA), handle
sorting of requests
 Some of the algorithms they use described next

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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
 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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 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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 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

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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
 Illustration shows total head movement of 208 cylinders
 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.)

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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
 Total number of cylinders?

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 C-SCAN (Cont.)

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 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, but still possible

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 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm
 To avoid starvation Linux implements deadline scheduler
• Maintains separate read and write queues, gives read priority
 Because processes more likely to block on read than write
• Implements four queues: 2 x read and 2 x write
 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in LBA order, essentially
implementing C-SCAN
 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in FCFS order
 All I/O requests sent in batch sorted in that queue’s order
 After each batch, checks if any requests in FCFS older than
configured age (default 500ms)
– If so, Logical Block Addressing (LBA) queue containing that
request is selected for next batch of I/O
 In Red Hat (RHEL 7) also NOOP and completely fair queueing
scheduler (CFQ) 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 is 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
 Disk I/O done in blocks
 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?
 If not, fix it, try again
 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
 Methods such as sector sparing Booting from secondary
used to handle bad blocks storage in Windows

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 Swap-Space Management
 Used for moving entire processes (swapping), or pages (paging),
from DRAM to secondary storage when DRAM not large enough for
all processes
 Operating system provides swap space management
• Secondary storage slower than DRAM, so important to optimize
performance
• Usually multiple swap spaces possible – decreasing I/O load on
any given device
• Best to have dedicated 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)
 High-speed serial architecture using fibre or copper
cables
 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
 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

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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
 Why have separate storage networks A Storage Array
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
 Checksums kept with pointer to object, to
detect if object is the right one and whether it
changed
 Can detect and correct data and metadata
corruption
 ZFS also removes volumes, partitions
• Disks allocated in pools
• Filesystems with a pool share that pool, ZFS checksums all
use and release space like malloc() and metadata and data
free() memory allocate / release calls

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 Traditional and Pooled Storage

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 Object Storage
 General-purpose computing, file systems not sufficient for very
large scale
 Another approach – start with a storage pool and place objects
in it
• Object just a container of data
• No way to navigate the pool to find objects (no directory
structures, few services
• Computer-oriented, not user-oriented
 Typical sequence
• Create an object within the pool, receive an object ID
• Access object via that ID
• Delete object via that ID

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 Object Storage (Cont.)

 Object storage management software like Hadoop file system

(HDFS) and Ceph determine where to store objects, manages
protection
• Typically by storing N copies, across N systems, in the object
storage cluster
• Horizontally scalable
• Content addressable, unstructured

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 End of Chapter 11

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018