Chapter 11: Mass-Storage

Systems

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 11: Mass-Storage Systems
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 HDD Scheduling
 NVM Scheduling
 Error Detection and Correction
 Storage Device Management
 Swap-Space Management
 Storage Attachment
 RAID Structure

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives
 Describe the physical structure of secondary
storage devices and the effect of a device’s
structure on its uses
 Explain the performance characteristics of
mass-storage devices
 Evaluate I/O scheduling algorithms
 Discuss operating-system services provided
for mass storage, including RAID

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Bulk of secondary storage for modern computers is hard disk
drives (HDDs) and nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices
 HDDs spin platters of magnetically-coated material under moving
read-write heads
• 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
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 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

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 Hard Disk Drives
 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
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 11.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 11.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Nonvolatile Memory Devices
 If disk-drive like, then called solid-state disks (SSDs)
 Other forms include USB drives (thumb drive, flash drive),
DRAM disk replacements, surface-mounted on motherboards,
and main storage in devices like smartphones
 Can be more reliable than HDDs
 More expensive per MB
 Maybe have shorter life span – need careful management
 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 – 10th Edition 11.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Nonvolatile Memory Devices
 Have characteristics that present
challenges
 Read and written in “page” increments
(think sector) but can’t overwrite in place
• Must first be erased, and erases happen
in larger ”block” increments
• Can only be erased a limited number of
times before worn out – ~ 100,000
• Life span measured in drive writes per
day (DWPD)
A 1TB NAND drive with rating of
5DWPD is expected to have 5TB per
day written within warrantee period
without failing Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.10
 NAND Flash Controller Algorithms
 With no overwrite, pages end up with mix of valid and invalid
data
 To track which logical blocks are valid, controller maintains
flash translation layer (FTL) table
 Also implements garbage collection to free invalid page space
 Allocates overprovisioning to provide working space for GC
 Each cell has lifespan, so wear leveling needed to write equally
to all cells

NAND block with valid and invalid pages

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Volatile Memory
 DRAM frequently used as mass-storage device
• Not technically secondary storage because volatile, but can have file
systems, be used like very fast secondary storage
 RAM drives (with many names, including RAM disks) present as raw block
devices, commonly file system formatted
 Computers have buffering, caching via RAM, so why RAM drives?
• Caches / buffers allocated / managed by programmer, operating system,
hardware
• RAM drives under user control
• Found in all major operating systems
 Linux /dev/ram, macOS diskutil to create them, Linux /tmp
of file system type tmpfs
 Used as high speed temporary storage
• Programs could share bulk date, quickly, by reading/writing to RAM
drive
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Magnetic Tape

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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
• 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 – 10th Edition 11.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Disk Attachment
 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O busses
 Several busses available, including advanced technology attachment
(ATA), serial ATA (SATA), eSATA, serial attached SCSI (SAS),
universal serial bus (USB), and fibre channel (FC).
 Most common is SATA
 Because NVM much faster than HDD, new fast interface for NVM called
NVM express (NVMe), connecting directly to PCI bus
 Data transfers on a bus carried out by special electronic processors called
controllers (or host-bus adapters, HBAs)
• Host controller on the computer end of the bus, device controller on
device end
• Computer places command on host controller, using memory-mapped I/O
ports
 Host controller sends messages to device controller
 Data transferred via DMA between device and computer DRAM
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Address Mapping
 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 – 10th Edition 11.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 HDD 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 – 10th Edition 11.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
 In the past, operating system responsible for queue management, disk drive head
scheduling
• Now, built into the storage devices, controllers
• Just provide LBAs, handle sorting of requests
 Some of the algorithms they use described next
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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 – 10th Edition 11.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 FCFS
• Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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 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 208
cylinders
 But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest
density at other end of disk and those wait the longest

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 SCAN (Cont.)

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 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?
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 C-SCAN (Cont.)

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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, but still possible
 To avoid starvation Linux implements deadline scheduler
• Maintains separate read and write queues, gives read priority
 Because processes more likely to block on read than write
• Implements four queues: 2 x read and 2 x write
 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in LBA order, essentially implementing C-
SCAN
1 read and 1 write queue sorted in FCFS order
 All I/O requests sent in batch sorted in that queue’s order
 After each batch, checks if any requests in FCFS older than configured age
(default 500ms)
– If so, LBA queue containing that request is selected for next batch of I/O
 In RHEL 7 also NOOP and completely fair queueing scheduler (CFQ) also
available, defaults vary by storage device
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 NVM Scheduling
 No disk heads or rotational latency but still room for
optimization
 In RHEL 7 NOOP (no scheduling) is used but adjacent
LBA requests are combined
• NVM best at random I/O, HDD at sequential
• Throughput can be similar
• Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) much
higher with NVM (hundreds of thousands vs hundreds)
• But write amplification (one write, causing garbage
collection and many read/writes) can decrease the
performance advantage
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Error Detection and Correction
 Fundamental aspect of many parts of computing (memory, networking,
storage)
 Error detection determines if there a problem has occurred (for
example a bit flipping)
• If detected, can halt the operation
• Detection frequently done via parity bit
 Parity one form of checksum – uses modular arithmetic to compute,
store, compare values of fixed-length words
• Another error-detection method common in networking is cyclic
redundancy check (CRC) which uses hash function to detect
multiple-bit errors
 Error-correction code (ECC) not only detects, but can correct some
errors
• Soft errors correctable, hard errors detected but not corrected
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Storage Device 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 – 10th Edition 11.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Storage Device Management (cont.)
 Root partition contains the OS, other partitions can hold other
Oses, other file systems, or be raw
• Mounted at boot time
• Other partitions can mount automatically or manually
 At mount time, file system consistency checked
• Is all metadata correct?
If not, fix it, try again
If yes, add to mount table, allow access
 Boot block can point to boot volume or boot loader set of blocks that
contain enough code to know how to load the kernel from the file
system
• Or a boot management program for multi-OS booting
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Device Storage 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, firmware
• Bootstrap loader program
stored in boot blocks of boot Booting from secondary
partition storage in Windows

 Methods such as sector sparing

used to handle bad blocks

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Swap-Space Management
 Used for moving entire processes (swapping), or pages (paging), from DRAM to
secondary storage when DRAM not large enough for all processes
 Operating system provides swap space management
• Secondary storage slower than DRAM, so important to optimize performance
• Usually multiple swap spaces possible – decreasing I/O load on any given
device
• Best to have dedicated devices
• Can be in raw partition or a file within a file system (for convenience of
adding)
• Data structures for swapping on Linux systems:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Storage Attachment
 Computers access storage in three ways
• host-attached
• network-attached
• cloud
 Host attached access through local I/O ports, using one of several
technologies
• To attach many devices, use storage busses such as USB,
firewire, thunderbolt
• High-end systems use fibre channel (FC)
High-speed serial architecture using fibre or copper cables
Multiple hosts and storage devices can connect to the FC
fabric
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Network-Attached Storage
 Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made available over a network
rather than over a local connection (such as a bus)
• Remotely attaching to file systems
 NFS and CIFS are common protocols
 Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs) between host and storage
over typically TCP or UDP on IP network
 iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI protocol
• Remotely attaching to devices (blocks)

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 Cloud Storage
 Similar to NAS, provides access to storage across a
network
• Unlike NAS, accessed over the Internet or a WAN to
remote data center
 NAS presented as just another file system, while cloud
storage is API based, with programs using the APIs to
provide access
• Examples include Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft
OneDrive, Apple iCloud
• Use APIs because of latency and failure scenarios (NAS
protocols wouldn’t work well)
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Storage Array
 Can just attach disks, or arrays of disks
 Avoids the NAS drawback of using network bandwidth
 Storage Array has controller(s), provides features to attached
host(s)
• Ports to connect hosts to array
• Memory, controlling software (sometimes NVRAM, etc)
• A few to thousands of disks
• RAID, hot spares, hot swap (discussed later)
• Shared storage -> more efficiency
• Features found in some file systems
Snaphots, clones, thin provisioning, replication,
deduplication, etc Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.35
 Storage Area Network

 Common in large storage environments

 Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays –
flexible

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Storage Area Network (Cont.)
 SAN is one or more storage arrays
• Connected to one or more Fibre
Channel switches or InfiniBand
(IB) network
 Hosts also attach to the switches
 Storage made available via LUN
Masking from specific arrays to
specific servers
 Easy to add or remove storage, add
new host and allocate it storage
 Why have separate storage networks A Storage Array
and communications networks?
• Consider iSCSI, FCOE
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 RAID Structure
 RAID – redundant array of inexpensive disks
• multiple disk drives provides reliability via redundancy
 Increases the mean time to failure
 Mean time to repair – exposure time when another failure could cause
data loss
 Mean time to data loss based on above factors
 If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with 1300,000 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 working cooperatively
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 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
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 RAID Levels

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 RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)

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 Other Features
 Regardless of where RAID implemented, other useful features
can be added
 Snapshot is a view of file system before a set of changes take
place (i.e. at a point in time)
• More in Ch 12
 Replication is automatic duplication of writes between separate
sites
• For redundancy and disaster recovery
• Can be synchronous or asynchronous
 Hot spare disk is unused, automatically used by RAID production
if a disk fails to replace the failed disk and rebuild the RAID set if
possible
• Decreases mean time to repair
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.42 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Extensions
 RAID alone does not prevent or detect data
corruption or other errors, just disk failures
 Solaris ZFS adds checksums of all data
and metadata
 Checksums kept with pointer to object, to
detect if object is the right one and whether
it changed
 Can detect and correct data and metadata
corruption
 ZFS also removes volumes, partitions
• Disks allocated in pools
• Filesystems with a pool share that pool,
use and release space like malloc( ) and
ZFS checksums all
free( ) memory allocate / release calls metadata and data
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.43 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Traditional and Pooled Storage

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.44 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Object Storage
 General-purpose computing, file systems not sufficient for very
large scale
 Another approach – start with a storage pool and place objects in
it
• Object just a container of data
• No way to navigate the pool to find objects (no directory
structures, few services
• Computer-oriented, not user-oriented
 Typical sequence
• Create an object within the pool, receive an object ID
• Access object via that ID
• Delete object via that ID
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.45 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Object Storage (Cont.)
 Object storage management software like
Hadoop file system (HDFS) and Ceph
determine where to store objects, manages
protection
• Typically by storing N copies, across N
systems, in the object storage cluster
• Horizontally scalable
• Content addressable, unstructured
Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 11.46 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 End of Chapter 11

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018