Overview of Mass Storage Structure




Overview of Mass-Storage Structure

 In this section we present a general overview of the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage devices.

Magnetic Disks

Magnetic disks provide the bulk of secondary storage for modern computer systems. Conceptually, disks are relatively simple (Figure 12.1). Each disk platter has a flat circular shape, like a CD. Common platter diameters range from 1.8 to 5.25 inches. The two surfaces of a platter are covered with a magnetic material. We store information by recording it magnetically on the platters.

A read-write head "flies" just above each surface of every platter. The heads are attached to a disk arm that moves all the heads as a unit. The surface of a platter is logically divided into circular tracks, which are subdivided into sectors. The set of tracks that are at one arm position makes up a cylinder. There may be thousands of concentric cylinders in a disk drive, and each track may contain hundreds of sectors. The storage capacity of common disk drives is measured in gigabytes. When the disk is in use, a drive motor spins it at high speed.

Most drives rotate 60 to 200 times per second. Disk speed has two parts. The transfer rate is the rate at which data flow between the drive and the computer. The positioning time, sometimes called the random-access time, consists of the time to move the disk arm to the desired cylinder, called the seek time, and the time for the desired sector to rotate to the disk head, called the rotational latency. Typical disks can transfer several megabytes of data per second, and they have seek times and rotational latencies of several milliseconds. Because the disk head flies on an extremely thin cushion of air (measured in microns), there is a danger that the head will make contact with the disk surface. Although the disk platters are coated with a thin protective layer, sometimes the head will damage the magnetic surface. This accident is called a head crash.

A head crash normally cannot be repaired; the entire disk must be replaced. A disk can be removable, allowing different disks to be mounted as needed. Removable magnetic disks generally consist of one platter, held in a plastic case to prevent damage while not in the disk drive. Floppy disks are inexpensive removable magnetic disks that have a soft plastic case containing a flexible platter. The head of a floppy-disk drive generally sits directly on the disk surface, so the drive is designed to rotate more slowly than a hard-disk drive

Overview of Mass Storage Structure

to reduce the wear on the disk surface. The storage capacity of a floppy disk is typically only 1.44 MB or so. Removable disks are available that work much like normal hard disks and have capacities measured in gigabytes. A disk drive is attached to a computer by a set of wires called an I/O bus. Several kinds of buses are available, including enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE), advanced technology attachment (ATA), serial ATA (SATA), universal serial bus (USB), fiber channel (FC), and SCSI buses. The data transfers on a bus are carried out by special electronic processors called controllers. The host controller is the controller at the computer end of the bus. A disk controller is built into each disk drive. To perform a disk I/O operation, the computer places a command into the host controller, typically using memory-mapped I/O ports, as described in Section 9.7.3.

Overview of Mass Storage Structure

The host controller then sends the command via messages to the disk controller, and the disk controller operates the disk-drive hardware to carry out the command. Disk controllers usually have a built-in cache. Data transfer at the disk drive happens between the cache and the disk surface, and data transfer to the host, at fast electronic speeds, occurs betwr een the cache and the host controller.

Magnetic Tapes

Magnetic tape was used as an early secondary-storage medium. Although it is relatively permanent and can hold large quantities of data, its access time is slow compared with that of main memory and magnetic disk. In addition, random access to magnetic tape is about a thousand times slower than random access to magnetic disk, so tapes are not very useful for secondary storage. Tapes are used mainly for backup, for storage of infrequently used information, and as a medium for transferring information from one system to another. A tape is kept in a spool and is wound or rewound past a read-write head. Moving to the correct spot on a tape can take minutes, but once positioned, tape drives can write data at speeds comparable to disk drives. Tape capacities vary greatly, depending on the particular kind of tape drive. Typically, they store from 20 GB to 200 GB. Some have built-in compression that can more than double the effective storage. Tapes and their drivers are usually categorized by width, including 4, 8, and 19 millimeters and 1/4 and 1/2 inch. Some are named according to technology, such as LTO-2 and SDLT. Tape storage is further described in Section 12.9.

Overview of Mass Storage Structure



Frequently Asked Questions

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Ans: Types of System Calls System calls can be grouped roughly into five major categories: process control, file manipulation, device manipulation, information maintenance, and communications. In Sections 2.4.1 through 2.4.5, we discuss briefly the types of system calls that may be provided by an operating system. view more..
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Ans: Event Ordering In a centralized system, we can always determine the order in which two events occurred, since the system has a single common memory and clock. Many applications may require us to determine order. For example, in a resourceallocation scheme, we specify that a resource can be used only after the resource has been granted. A distributed system, however, has no common memory and no common clock. Therefore, it is sometimes impossible to say which of two events occurred first. The liappened-before relation is only a partial ordering of the events in distributed systems. Since the ability to define a total ordering is crucial in many applications, we present a distributed algorithm for exterding the happened-before relation to a consistent total ordering of all the events in the system. view more..
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Ans: Mutual Exclusion In this section, we present a number of different algorithms for implementing mutual exclusion in a distributed environment. We assume that the system consists of n processes, each of which resides at a different processor. To simplify our discussion, we assume that processes are numbered uniquely from 1 to n and that a one-to-one mapping exists between processes and processors (that is, each process has its own processor). view more..
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Ans: Overview of Mass-Storage Structure In this section we present a general overview of the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage devices. view more..
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Ans: Atomic Transactions The mutual exclusion of critical sections ensures that the critical sections are executed atomically. That is, if two critical sections are executed concurrently, the result is equivalent to their sequential execution in some unknown order. Although this property is useful in many application domains, in many cases we would like to make sure that a critical section forms a single logical unit of work that either is performed in its entirety or is not performed at all. An example is funds transfer, in which one account is debited and another is credited. Clearly, it is essential for data consistency either that both the credit and debit occur or that neither occur. Consistency of data, along with storage and retrieval of data, is a concern often associated with database systems. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest in using database-systems techniques in operating systems. view more..
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Ans: Programmer Interface The Win32 API is the fundamental interface to the capabilities of Windows XP. This section describes five main aspects of the Win32 API: access to kernel objects, sharing of objects between processes, process management, interprocess communication, and memory management. view more..
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Ans: Memory Management The main memory is central to the operation of a modern computer system. Main memory is a large array of words or bytes, ranging in size from hundreds of thousands to billions. Each word or byte has its own address. Main memory is a repository of quickly accessible data shared by the CPU and I/O devices. The central processor reads instructions from main memory during the instruction-fetch cycle and both reads and writes data from main memory during the data-fetch cycle (on a Von Neumann architecture). The main memory is generally the only large storage device that the CPU is able to address and access directly. view more..
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Ans: Storage Management To make the computer system convenient for users, the operating system provides a uniform, logical view of information storage. The operating system abstracts from the physical properties of its storage devices to define a logical storage unit, the file. The operating system maps files onto physical media and accesses these files via the storage devices view more..
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Ans: Protection and Security If a computer system has multiple users and allows the concurrent execution of multiple processes, then access to data must be regulated. For that purpose, mechanisms ensure that files, memory segments, CPU, and other resources can be operated on by only those processes that have gained proper authorization from the operating system. For example, memory-addressing hardware ensures that a process can execute only within its own address space. view more..
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Ans: Distributed Systems A distributed system is a collection of physically separate, possibly heterogeneous computer systems that are networked to provide the users with access to the various resources that the system maintains. Access to a shared resource increases computation speed, functionality, data availability, and reliability. Some operating systems generalize network access as a form of file access, with the details of networking contained in the network interface's device driver. view more..
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Ans: Special-Purpose Systems The discussion thus far has focused on general-purpose computer systems that we are all familiar with. There are, however, different classes of computer systems whose functions are more limited and whose objective is to deal with limited computation domains. view more..
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Ans: Operating systems provide a number of services. At the lowest level, system calls allow a running program to make requests from the operating system directly. At a higher level, the command interpreter or shell provides a mechanism for a user to issue a request without writing a program. Commands may come from files during batch-mode execution or directly from a terminal when in an interactive or time-shared mode. System programs are provided to satisfy many common user requests. The types of requests vary according to level. view more..
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Ans: Summary A thread is a flow of control within a process. A multithreaded process contains several different flows of control within the same address space. The benefits of multithreading include increased responsiveness to the user, resource sharing within the process, economy, and the ability to take advantage of multiprocessor architectures. User-level threads are threads that are visible to the programmer and are unknown to the kernel. view more..
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Ans: Motivation A distributed system is a collection of loosely coupled processors interconnected by a communication network. From the point of view of a specific processor in a distributed system, the rest of the processors and their respective resources are remote, whereas its own resources are local. The processors in a distributed system may vary in size and function. They may include small microprocessors, workstations, minicomputers, and large general-purpose computer systems. view more..
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Ans: Summary Multimedia applications are in common use in modern computer systems. Multimedia files include video and audio files, which may be delivered to systems such as desktop computers, personal digital assistants, and cell phones. view more..
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Ans: Summary It is desirable to be able to execute a process whose logical address space is larger than the available physical address space. Virtual memory is a technique that enables us to map a large logical address space onto a smaller physical memory. Virtual memory allowr s us to run extremely large processes and to raise the degree of multiprogramming, increasing CPU utilization. Further, it frees application programmers from worrying about memory availability. In addition, with virtual memory, several processes can share system libraries and memory. view more..
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Ans: Summary Disk drives are the major secondary-storage I/O devices on most computers. Most secondary storage devices are either magnetic disks or magnetic tapes. Modern disk drives are structured as a large one-dimensional array of logical disk blocks which is usually 512 bytes. Disks may be attached to a computer system in one of two ways: (1) using the local I/O ports on the host computer or (2) using a network connection such as storage area networks. view more..




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