OPERATING

SYSTEMS

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Lesson 10: Mass-Storage Systems

Nguyễn Thị Hậu (UET-VNU)

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 CONTENT
•  Overview of Mass Storage Structure
•  HDD Scheduling
•  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

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•  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

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•  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
track t spindle

arm assembly
sector s

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cylinder c read-write
head

platter
arm

rotation

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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

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•  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 6
•  Average latency = ½ latency
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

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•  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 7
The First Commercial Disk Drive

1956
IBM RAMDAC computer
included the IBM Model
350 disk storage system

5M (7 bit) characters

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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

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•  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 9
•  No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency
 Disk Structure
•  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

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•  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 10
 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

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•  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 11
 HDD SCHEDULING

The operating system is responsible for using

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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

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•  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
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•  Just provide LBAs, handle sorting of requests
•  Some of the algorithms they use described next
 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

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(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
Illustration shows total head movement of 208 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

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•  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

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•  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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C-LOOK

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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

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•  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, defaults vary by storage device 22
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

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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?

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! 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

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system
•  The bootstrap is stored in
ROM, firmware
•  Bootstrap loader program
stored in boot blocks of boot Booting from secondary
storage in Windows
partition
•  Methods such as sector
sparing used to handle bad 25
blocks
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

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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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Exercise
•  Suppose that a disk drive has 5,000 cylinders, numbered 0 to
4,999. The drive is currently serving a request at cylinder
2,150, and the previous request was at cylinder 1,805. The
queue of pending requests, in FIFO order, is: 2069, 1212,
2296, 2800, 544, 1618, 356, 1523, 4965, 3681

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•  Starting from the current head position, what is the total
distance (in cylinders) that the disk arm moves to satisfy all
the pending requests for each of the following disk-scheduling
algorithms?
a. FCFS b. SSTF
c. SCAN d. LOOK
e. C-SCAN f. C-LOOK 27
RAID STRUCTURE

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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 failure of a single disk is 100,000 hours
mean time to failure of 100 disks will be 100,000/100 = 1,000
hours, or 41.66 days

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•  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
100,000 hours mean time to failure and 10 hour mean
time to repair
•  Mean time to data loss is 100, 0002 / (2 ∗ 10) = 500 ∗ 106 29
hours, or 57,000 years!
 RAID Structure
•  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)

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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 31
 RAID Levels
•  RAID level 1 striping at the
level of blocks
•  RAID level 2 striping of bytes,
Each byte in a memory system
may have a parity bit
•  RAID level 3 bit-interleaved, a
single parity bit can be used for

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error correction as well as for
detection in each sector.
•  RAID level 4 block-interleaved
parity organization uses block-
level striping
•  RAID level 5 spreads data and
parity among all N+1 disks
•  RAID level 6 stores extra
redundant information to guard
against multiple disk failures (2 32
bits of redundant data are
stored for every 4 bits of data)
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

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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
metadata block 1
data and metadata address 1 address 2

•  Checksums kept with pointer to object, checksum MB2 checksum

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to detect if object is the right one and
metadata block 2
whether it changed address address

•  Can detect and correct data and checksum D1 checksum D2

metadata corruption data 1 data 2

•  ZFS also removes volumes, partitions

volume volume volume

(a) Traditional volumes and file systems.

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ZFS ZFS ZFS

storage pool

(b) ZFS and pooled storage. 36

•  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

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•  Access object via that ID
•  Delete object via that ID
•  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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Homework
Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Baer Galvin, Greg Gagne,
Operating System Concepts, 9th edition, 2013
Compulsory:
•  Problem: 10.11,

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•  Programming: 10.24

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Thank you!

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Q&A

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