Chapter 10: Mass-Storage

Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 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 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 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
 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
 Solid-State Disks
 Nonvolatile memory used like a hard drive
 Many technology variations
 Can be more reliable than HDDs
 More expensive per MB
 Maybe have shorter life span
 Less capacity
 But much faster
 Busses can be too slow -> connect directly to PCI for
example
 No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational
latency

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Magnetic Tape
 Was early secondary-storage medium
 Evolved from open spools to cartridges
 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
 140MB/sec and greater
 200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
 Common technologies are LTO-{3,4,5} and T10000

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Disk Attachment
 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports
talking to I/O busses
 SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one cable,
SCSI initiator requests operation and SCSI targets
perform tasks
 Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks
attached to device controller)
 FC is high-speed serial architecture
 Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space –
the basis of storage area networks (SANs) in which
many hosts attach to many storage units
 I/O directed to bus ID, device ID, logical unit (LUN)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 C-SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 C-LOOK (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 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 10.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Disk 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 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne
 Disk 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 system
 The bootstrap is stored in ROM
 Bootstrap loader program stored in boot blocks
of boot partition
 Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad
blocks

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne