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
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 Hard Disk Performance
 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek
time + average 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 .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
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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
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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 via11.15
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Silberschatz,
 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

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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
 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
 In the past, operating system responsible for queue
management, disk drive head scheduling
• Now, built into the storage devices, controllers
• Just provide LBAs, 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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 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
 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, LBA queue containing that request is selected for next
batch of I/O
 In RHEL 7 also NOOP and completely fair queueing scheduler (CFQ)
also
available,
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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
 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
 Methods such as sector Booting from secondary
boot partition
sparing storage in Windows
used to handle bad blocks

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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
 Hosts (IB) to
also attach network
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
• Consider iSCSI,
networks?
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
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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 ZFS checksums all
that pool, use and release metadata and data
space like malloc() and
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