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

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 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

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 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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 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

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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 236 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.)

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?

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 C-LOOK (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
 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?

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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

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

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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

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