Mass-Storage System
Mass-Storage System
Mass-Storage System
Systems
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
Magnetic 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
Average latency = ½ latency
(From Wikipedia)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
Magnetic 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 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
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 10.6 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 10.7 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 10.8 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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.9 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
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 10.10 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
Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can manage a queue of I/O requests (of varying “depth”)
Head pointer 53
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.12 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 10.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
SSTF (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.14 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.
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 10.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
SCAN (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.16 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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
C-SCAN (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.18 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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
C-LOOK (Cont.)
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.20 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
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
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
End of Chapter 12
Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013