Analysis of Algorithms 1

(Fall 2013)
Istanbul Technical University
Computer Eng. Dept.

Secondary Storage Devices

Advanced Data Structures, Dr. Çataltepe & Dr. Ekenel, Dept. of Computer Engineering, ITU
Last updated: September 20, 2011 1
 Outline
• Secondary storage devices
• Magnetic Disc
• (Tape, CD, DVD)
• Buffer Management

Week 1: Introduction 2
 Secondary Storage Devices
• Secondary storage (external memory) is slower and larger
than main memory. We will go through different secondary
storage devices in order to understand how they work .
• Two major types of storage devices
– Direct Access Storage Devices (DASDs)
• Magnetic Disks
Hard Disks (high capacity, low cost per bit)
• Optical Disks
CD-ROM,DVD-ROM
(Read-only/write-once, holds a lot of data, cheap, CD-ROMs
that you can add on data are now available)
– Serial Devices
• Magnetic Tapes (primarily used for backups)

Week 1: Introduction 3
 Magnetic Disks
• Magnetic disks support direct access to a desired
location
• Simplified structure of a disk
– Disk blocks
– Tracks
– Platters
– Cylinder
– Sectors
– Disk heads
– Disk Controller
– Seek Time
– Rotational delay

Week 1: Introduction 4
 Components of a Disk
• The platters spin (7200 rpm)
• The arm assembly is moved
in or out to position a head
on a desired track. Tracks
under heads make a
cylinder (imaginary!).
• Only one head reads/writes
at any one time
• Block size is a multiple of
sector size (which is fixed)

Week 1: Introduction 5
 Looking at a Surface
• Disk contains concentric tracks
• Tracks are divided into sectors
• A sector is the smallest addressable unit in disk

Week 1: Introduction 6
 Cylinder
• Cylinder: the set of tracks on a
disk that are directly above/
below each other
• All the information on a cylinder
can be accessed without
moving the read/write arm
(seeking)

Week 1: Introduction 7
 The Bottleneck
• When a program reads a byte from the disk, the
operating system locates the surface, track and
sector containing that byte, and reads the entire
sector into a special area in main memory called
buffer.
• The bottleneck of a disk access is moving the
read/write arm. So, it makes sense to store a file
in tracks that are below/above each other in
different surfaces, rather than in several tracks
in the same surface.

Week 1: Introduction 8
 How to Calculate Disk Capacity
• Number of cylinders =
number of tracks in a surface
• Track capacity =
number of sector per track ×
bytes per sector
• Cylinder capacity =
number of surfaces ×
track capacity
• Drive capacity =
number of cylinders ×
cylinder capacity

Week 1: Introduction 9
 Disk as a Bottleneck
• Processes are often disk-bound
• network and CPU have to wait a long time for the
disk to transmit data
• Various techniques to solve this problem
1. Multiprocessing: (CPU works on other jobs
while waiting for the disk)
2. Disk Striping:
► Putting different blocks of the file in different
drives.
► Independent processes accessing the same
file may not interfere with each other
(parallelism)
3. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)
4. RAM Disk (Memory Disk) Piece of main memory
is used to simulate a disk (speed vs. volatility)
Week 1: Introduction 10
 Disk as a Bottleneck (cont.)
• Various techniques to solve this problem
5. Disk Cache:
► Large block of memory configured to contain
pages of data from a disk.
► When data is requested from disk, first the cache
is checked.
► If data is not there (miss) the disk is accessed

Week 1: Introduction 11
 BUFFER MANAGEMENT

Week 1: Introduction 12
 A journey of a byte
• Suppose in our program we wrote:
outfile << c;
• This causes a call to the file manager (a part of O.S.
responsible for I/O operations)
• The O/S (file manager) makes sure that the byte is
written to the disk.
• Pieces of software/hardware involved in I/O:
– Application Program
– Operating System/ File Manager
– I/O Processor
– Disk Controller

Week 1: Introduction 13
• Application Program
– Requests the I/O operation
• Operating System / File Manager
– Keeps tables for all opened files
– Brings appropriate sector to buffer.
– Writes byte to buffer
– Gives instruction to I/O processor to write data from this buffer
into correct place in disk.
– Note: the buffer is an exact image of a cluster in disk.
• I/O Processor
– Separate chip; runs independently of CPU
– Find a time when drive is available to receive data and put data in
proper format for the disk
– Sends data to disk controller
• Disk controller
– Separate chip; instructs the drive to move R/W head
– Sends the byte to the surface when the proper sector comes
under R/W head.

Week 1: Introduction 14
 Buffer Management
• Buffering means working with large chunks of data in
main memory so the number of accesses to secondary
storage is reduced.
• We’ll discuss the System I/O buffers. These are beyond
the control of application programs and are manipulated
by the O.S.
• Note that the application program may implement its
own “buffer” – i.e. a place in memory (variable, object)
that accumulates large chunks of data to be later written
to disk as a chunk.

Week 1: Introduction 15
 System I/O Buffer
Data transferred
by blocks

Secondary
Buffer Program
Storage

Data transferred
by records
Temporary storage in MM
for one block of data

Week 1: Introduction 16
 Buffer Bottlenecks
• Consider the following program segment:
while (1) {
infile >> ch;
if (infile.fail()) break;
outfile << ch;
}
• What happens if the O.S. used only one I/O buffer?
⇒ Buffer bottleneck
• Most O.S. have an input buffer and an output buffer.

Week 1: Introduction 17
 Buffering Strategies
• Double Buffering: Two buffers can be used to allow
processing and I/O to overlap.
– Suppose that a program is only writing to a disk.
– CPU wants to fill a buffer at the same time that I/O is
being performed.
– If two buffers are used and I/O-CPU overlapping is
permitted, CPU can be filling one buffer while the
other buffer is being transmitted to disk.
– When both tasks are finished, the roles of the buffers
can be exchanged.
• The actual management is done by the O.S.

Week 1: Introduction 18
 Double Buffering
I/O Buffer 1
To disk
(a) Program data area

I/O Buffer 2

I/O Buffer 1

(b) Program data area

I/O Buffer 2
To disk

Week 1: Introduction 19
 Other Buffering Strategies
• Multiple Buffering: instead of two buffers any number
of buffers can be used to allow processing and I/O to
overlap.
• Buffer pooling:
– There is a pool of buffers.
– When a request for a sector is received, O.S. first looks to
see that sector is in some buffer.
– If not there, it brings the sector to some free buffer. If no free
buffer exists, it must choose an occupied buffer. Usually
LRU (Least Recently Used) strategy is used.

Week 1: Introduction 20