Chapter 11: Mass-Storage
Systems
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Chapter 10: Mass-Storage Systems
Overview of Mass Storage Structure
Disk Structure
Disk Scheduling
RAID Structure
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Objectives
To describe the physical structure of secondary storage devices
and its effects on the uses of the devices
To explain the performance characteristics of mass-storage
devices
To evaluate disk scheduling algorithms
To discuss operating-system services provided for mass storage,
including RAID
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Moving-head Disk Mechanism
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Overview of Mass Storage Structure
Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary storage of modern computers
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
Drive attached to computer via I/O bus
Busses vary, including EIDE, ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre Channel,
SCSI, SAS, Firewire
Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk controller built
into drive or storage array
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Hard Disks
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 (From Wikipedia)
Average latency = ½ latency
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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 – 9th Edition 10.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Shortest Seek Time First (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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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 236 cylinders
But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest density at other
end of disk and those wait the longest
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
SCAN (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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?
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
C-SCAN (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
C-LOOK
LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a 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
Total number of cylinders?
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
C-LOOK (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Performance depends on the number and types of requests
Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation method
And metadata layout
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
What about rotational latency?
Difficult for OS to calculate
How does disk-based queueing effect OS queue ordering efforts?
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
RAID Levels
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
End of Chapter 10
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
