Disk Management

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 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 10.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.3 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 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 10.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 10.7 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 10.13 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 10.14 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 10.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 FCFS
We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67; Head pointer 53

Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 FCFS
We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SSTF
We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67; Head pointer 53

Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 10.20 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
we need to know the direction of head movement in addition
to the head’s current position.
Assuming that the disk arm is moving toward 0 and that the initial
head position is again 53, the head will next service 37
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 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.22 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 10.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.24 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 10.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-LOOK (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.26 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 10.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 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 10.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013