NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL ECONOMICS

CHAPTER 4
MASS-STORAGE SYSTEMS

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OUTLINE

 Overview of Mass Storage Structure

 I/O Systems
 Magnetic Disks
 Disk Scheduling
 Disk Management
 Swap-Space Management
 RAID Structure

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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. Common drives spin at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000,
and 15,000 RPM.
 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) + time for desired sector to rotate under the disk head (rotational latency)
 Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface

 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
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I/O SYSTEMS

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MAGNETIC DISKS

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DISK SECTOR

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SOLID-STATE DISKS

 SSDs: Old technologies are used in

new ways as economics change or the
technologies evolve.
 Same characteristics as hard disks but
can be more reliable because they have
no moving parts => no seek time or
latency
 They consume less power, more
expensive per megabyte, less
capacity, shorter life spans
 Some systems use them as a direct 7
MAGNETIC TAPE

 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
 Moving to the correct spot on a tape can take minutes
 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
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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

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MAGNETIC DISKS

 Platters range from .85” to 14” (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)
 Latency based on spindle speed
 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM

 Average latency = ½ latency

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MAGNETIC DISK PERFORMANCE

 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time + average

latency
 For fastest disk: 3ms + 2ms = 5ms
 For common 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 = 32 / 1024 2 = 0.031 ms
 Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms
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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

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DISK SCHEDULING (CONT.)

 There are many sources of disk I/O request

 OS
 System processes
 Users processes

 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

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DISK SCHEDULING (CONT.)

 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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1. FCFS SCHEDULING

 First-Come, First-Served (FCFS) algorithm

 Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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2. SSTF SCHEDULING

 Shortest Seek Time First (SSTF) 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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3. SCAN SCHEDULING

 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
 But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest density at other
end of disk and those wait the longest

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3. SCAN SCHEDULING (CONT.)

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4. C-SCAN SCHEDULING

 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

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4. C-SCAN SCHEDULING (CONT.)

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5. LOOK, CLOOK SCHEDULING

 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

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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
 Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm
 What about rotational latency? => Difficult for OS to calculate

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DISK MANAGEMENT

 Before a disk can store data, it must be divided into sectors that the disk controller
can read and write. This process is called low Low-level formatting, or physical
formatting
 Each sector can hold header information, plus data (Usually 512 bytes of data), plus error
correction code (ECC)
 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”:
 OS stores the initial file-system data structures
 Include maps of free and allocated space

 Increase efficiency: group blocks into clusters

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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
 The problem is that changing this bootstrap code requires changing the ROM
hardware chips.
 For this reason, most systems store a tiny bootstrap loader program in the boot
 ROM whose only job is to bring in a full bootstrap program from disk
 Disk that has a boot partition is called a boot disk or system disk.

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BAD BLOCKS

 Because disks have moving parts and small tolerances (recall that the disk head flies
just above the disk surface), they are prone to failure
 More frequently, one or more sectors become defective. Most disks even come from
the factory with bad blocks
 Depending on the disk and controller in use, these blocks are handled in a variety of
ways
 One strategy is to scan the disk to find bad blocks while the disk is being formatted.
 Any bad blocks that are discovered are flagged as unusable so that the file system
does not allocate them
 A special program (such as the Linux badblocks command) must be run to search for
the bad blocks and to lock them away
 Data that resided on the bad blocks usually are lost
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SWAP-SPACE MANAGEMENT

 Swap-space - Virtual memory uses disk space as an extension of

main memory
 Less common now due to memory capacity increases
 Kernel uses swap maps to track swap-space use

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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 (single disk = 100,000 hours)
 Mean time to repair – exposure time when another failure could cause data loss
(10 hours)
 Mean time to data loss based on above factors = MTF2/(2*MTR)
 If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with 100,000 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
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working cooperatively
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 28
 RAID Levels

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RAID 0

 RAID 0 splits data evenly across two or

more disks, without parity information,
redundancy
 This configuration is typically
implemented having speed as the
intended goal
 Since RAID 0 provides no fault tolerance or
redundancy, the failure of one drive will
cause the entire array to fail;
 A RAID 0 setup can be created with disks
of differing sizes, 30
RAID 1

 RAID 1 consists of an exact copy (or

mirror) of a set of data on two or more
disks; a classic RAID 1 mirrored pair
contains two disks.
 However, if disks with different speeds
are used in a RAID 1 array, overall write
performance is equal to the speed of the
slowest disk.

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RAID 2

 RAID 2, which is rarely used in practice, stripes data at the bit

 uses a Hamming code for error correction.

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RAID 3

 RAID 3, which is rarely used in practice, consists of byte-level

striping with a dedicated parity disk

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RAID 4

 RAID 4 consists of block-level striping with a dedicated parity disk.

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RAID 5

 Unlike in RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives.

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RAID 10

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