Mass-Storage Systems

Overview of Mass Storage

Structure
 Magnetic disks provide the bulk of secondary storage for modern
computer systems. Conceptually, disks are relatively simple.
 Each disk platter has a flat circular shape, like a CD.
 Common platter diameters range from 1.8 to 5.25 inches. The
two surfaces of a platter are covered with a magnetic material.
 We store information by recording it magnetically on the platters.
 A read-write head "flies" just above each surface of every platter.
The heads are attached to a disk arm that moves all the heads as
a unit.
 The surface of a platter is logically divided into circular tracks,
which are subdivided into sectors.
 The set of tracks that are at one arm position makes up a
cylinder.
 There may be thousands of concentric cylinders in a disk drive,
and each track may contain hundreds of sectors.
 The storage capacity of common disk drives is measured in
gigabytes.
 When the disk is in use, a drive motor spins it at high speed.
Most drives rotate 60 to 200 times per second.
 Disk speed has two parts. The transfer rate is the rate at which
data flow between the drive and the computer.
 The positioning time, sometimes called the random-access time,
consists of the time to move the disk arm to the desired
cylinder, called the seek time, and the time for the desired
sector to rotate to the disk head, called the rotational latency.
 Typical disks can transfer several megabytes of data per
second, and they have seek times and rotational latencies of
several milliseconds.
Moving-head Disk Machanism
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
(Cont.)

 Magnetic tape
 Was early secondary-storage medium
 Relatively permanent 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
 Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
 20-200GB typical storage
 Common technologies are 4mm, 8mm, 19mm, LTO-2 and
SDLT
 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.
 Access time has two major components
 Seek time is the time for the disk are to move the
heads to the cylinder containing the desired sector.
 Rotational latency is the additional time waiting for
the disk to rotate the desired sector to the disk head.
 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.
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)

 Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of

disk I/O requests.
 We illustrate them 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

 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.
SSTF (Cont.)
 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.
 Sometimes called the elevator algorithm.
 Illustration shows total head movement of 208
cylinders.
SCAN (Cont.)
 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.)
 C-LOOK

 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.
C-LOOK (Cont.)
 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.
 Performance depends on the number and types of
requests.
 Requests for disk service can be influenced by the
file-allocation method.
 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.
 Disk Management

 Low-level formatting, or physical formatting —

Dividing a disk into sectors that the disk controller
can read and write.
 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.
 Logical formatting or “making a file system”.
 Boot block initializes system.
 The bootstrap is stored in ROM.
 Bootstrap loader program.
 Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad
blocks.
Booting from a Disk in Windows
2000
 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.
 Swap-space management
 4.3BSD allocates swap space when process starts;
holds text segment (the program) and data
segment.
 Kernel uses swap maps to track swap-space use.
 Solaris 2 allocates swap space only when a page
is forced out of physical memory, not when the
virtual memory page is first created.
Data Structures for Swapping on Linux
Systems
 RAID Structure

 RAID – multiple disk drives provides reliability via

redundancy.

 RAID is arranged into six different levels.

 RAID (cont)

 Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve

the use of multiple disks working cooperatively.

 Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage

unit.

 RAID schemes improve performance and improve the

reliability of the storage system by storing redundant
data.
 Mirroring or shadowing keeps duplicate of each
disk.
 Block interleaved parity uses much less
redundancy.
RAID Levels
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
 Stable-Storage Implementation

 Write-ahead log scheme requires stable storage.

 To implement stable storage:

 Replicate information on more than one
nonvolatile storage media with independent failure
modes.
 Update information in a controlled manner to
ensure that we can recover the stable data after
any failure during data transfer or recovery.
 Tertiary Storage Devices

 Low cost is the defining characteristic of tertiary

storage.

 Generally, tertiary storage is built using removable

media

 Common examples of removable media are floppy

disks and CD-ROMs; other types are available.
 Removable Disks

 Floppy disk — thin flexible disk coated with magnetic

material, enclosed in a protective plastic case.

 Most floppies hold about 1 MB; similar technology is

used for removable disks that hold more than 1 GB.
 Removable magnetic disks can be nearly as fast as
hard disks, but they are at a greater risk of damage
from exposure.
 Removable Disks (Cont.)

 A magneto-optic disk records data on a rigid platter

coated with magnetic material.
 Laser heat is used to amplify a large, weak
magnetic field to record a bit.
 Laser light is also used to read data (Kerr effect).
 The magneto-optic head flies much farther from
the disk surface than a magnetic disk head, and
the magnetic material is covered with a protective
layer of plastic or glass; resistant to head crashes.

 Optical disks do not use magnetism; they employ

special materials that are altered by laser light.
 WORM Disks

 The data on read-write disks can be modified over and

over.
 WORM (“Write Once, Read Many Times”) disks can be
written only once.
 Thin aluminum film sandwiched between two glass or
plastic platters.
 To write a bit, the drive uses a laser light to burn a
small hole through the aluminum; information can be
destroyed by not altered.
 Very durable and reliable.
 Read Only disks, such ad CD-ROM and DVD, com from
the factory with the data pre-recorded.
 Tapes

 Compared to a disk, a tape is less expensive and

holds more data, but random access is much slower.
 Tape is an economical medium for purposes that do
not require fast random access, e.g., backup copies of
disk data, holding huge volumes of data.
 Large tape installations typically use robotic tape
changers that move tapes between tape drives and
storage slots in a tape library.
 stacker – library that holds a few tapes
 silo – library that holds thousands of tapes
 A disk-resident file can be archived to tape for low
cost storage; the computer can stage it back into disk
storage for active use.
 Operating System Issues

 Major OS jobs are to manage physical devices and to

present a virtual machine abstraction to applications

 For hard disks, the OS provides two abstraction:

 Raw device – an array of data blocks.
 File system – the OS queues and schedules the
interleaved requests from several applications.
 Application Interface

 Most OSs handle removable disks almost exactly like

fixed disks — a new cartridge is formatted and an
empty file system is generated on the disk.
 Tapes are presented as a raw storage medium, i.e.,
and application does not not open a file on the tape, it
opens the whole tape drive as a raw device.
 Usually the tape drive is reserved for the exclusive
use of that application.
 Since the OS does not provide file system services,
the application must decide how to use the array of
blocks.
 Since every application makes up its own rules for
how to organize a tape, a tape full of data can
generally only be used by the program that created it.
 Tape Drives

 The basic operations for a tape drive differ from those

of a disk drive.
 locate positions the tape to a specific logical block,
not an entire track (corresponds to seek).
 The read position operation returns the logical block
number where the tape head is.
 The space operation enables relative motion.
 Tape drives are “append-only” devices; updating a
block in the middle of the tape also effectively erases
everything beyond that block.
 An EOT mark is placed after a block that is written.
 File Naming

 The issue of naming files on removable media is

especially difficult when we want to write data on a
removable cartridge on one computer, and then use
the cartridge in another computer.
 Contemporary OSs generally leave the name space
problem unsolved for removable media, and depend
on applications and users to figure out how to access
and interpret the data.
 Some kinds of removable media (e.g., CDs) are so well
standardized that all computers use them the same
way.
 Hierarchical Storage Management
(HSM)

 A hierarchical storage system extends the storage

hierarchy beyond primary memory and secondary
storage to incorporate tertiary storage — usually
implemented as a jukebox of tapes or removable
disks.
 Usually incorporate tertiary storage by extending the
file system.
 Small and frequently used files remain on disk.
 Large, old, inactive files are archived to the
jukebox.
 HSM is usually found in supercomputing centers and
other large installations that have enormous volumes
of data.
 Speed

 Two aspects of speed in tertiary storage are

bandwidth and latency.

 Bandwidth is measured in bytes per second.

 Sustained bandwidth – average data rate during a
large transfer; # of bytes/transfer time.
Data rate when the data stream is actually
flowing.
 Effective bandwidth – average over the entire I/O
time, including seek or locate, and cartridge
switching.
Drive’s overall data rate.
 Speed (Cont.)
 Access latency – amount of time needed to locate data.
 Access time for a disk – move the arm to the selected
cylinder and wait for the rotational latency; < 35
milliseconds.
 Access on tape requires winding the tape reels until the
selected block reaches the tape head; tens or hundreds of
seconds.
 Generally say that random access within a tape cartridge
is about a thousand times slower than random access on
disk.
 The low cost of tertiary storage is a result of having many
cheap cartridges share a few expensive drives.
 A removable library is best devoted to the storage of
infrequently used data, because the library can only satisfy a
relatively small number of I/O requests per hour.
 Reliability

 A fixed disk drive is likely to be more reliable than a

removable disk or tape drive.

 An optical cartridge is likely to be more reliable than

a magnetic disk or tape.

 A head crash in a fixed hard disk generally destroys

the data, whereas the failure of a tape drive or optical
disk drive often leaves the data cartridge unharmed.
 Cost

 Main memory is much more expensive than disk

storage

 The cost per megabyte of hard disk storage is

competitive with magnetic tape if only one tape is
used per drive.

 The cheapest tape drives and the cheapest disk

drives have had about the same storage capacity over
the years.

 Tertiary storage gives a cost savings only when the

number of cartridges is considerably larger than the
number of drives.
Price per Megabyte of DRAM, From 1981 to
2004
Price per Megabyte of Magnetic Hard Disk, From 1981
to 2004
Price per Megabyte of a Tape Drive, From
1984-2000