PC Hardware Servicing
Chapter 10: Introduction to Disk Storage
Chapter 10 Objectives
Understand magnetic and optical storage Explain cylinders, heads, tracks, and sectors Understand low-level and high-level formatting Explain principles of partitioning Choose an appropriate file system for the OS to be installed
How Disks Store Data
Magnetic or optical Based on transitions
Electrical: positive or negative Optical: pit or land
Magnetic Storage
Hard Disks, Floppy Disks Polarity change between positive and negative
Optical Storage
CD, DVD Change between pit (less reflective) and land (more reflective)
Disks Versus Drives
Disk: Platters that store data Drive: Mechanism that spins and reads platters Hard disk drive: integrated disk and drive Floppy and CD: separate disk and drive
How Disk Space is Organized
Heads: Read-write mechanisms, one for each side of each disk platter
How Disk Space is Organized
Tracks: Concentric rings on a platter
How Disk Space is Organized
Cylinders: The same track on a stack of platters and sides
How Disk Space is Organized
Sectors: Sections of a track created by radial lines from the center of the disk
Low-Level Formatting
Creates tracks and sectors Defines the disk geometry Done at the factory
Zoned Recording and Sector Translation
Zoned Recording: Fewer sectors in center of disk than at outer rings Sector Translation: Conversion between physical sectors and logical ones needed to interface with PC
Floppy Drive BIOS Support
Not Plug and Play
CD-ROM Drive BIOS Support
Auto (Recommended) CD-ROM ATAPI Removable IDE Removable
BIOS Translation Methods
Standard CHS: Cylinders, Heads, Sectors Extended CHS (ECHS, also called Large) Logical Block Addressing LBA
Enhanced BIOS Services for Disk Drives
A BIOS feature, not a drive feature Released in 1998 Gives the BIOS the capability to recognize large drive sizes (over 8.4 GB) Primary reason why very old PCs cannot see large new drives Requires a BIOS update for motherboard or add-on BIOS utility from drive maker
Data Transfer Modes
DMA: Direct Memory Addressing
Regular and bus mastering
PIO: Programmed Input/Output
PIO modes 0 through 4
UltraDMA (Ultra ATA)
Modern standard for drive interfaces Makes regular DMA and PIO obsolete Much faster (33MB/sec to over 150MB/sec)
Disk Partitions
Physical drive can be divided up
Primary partition Extended partition
Each partition can have one or more logical drives
Primary partition can have only one drive letter Extended partition can have multiple drive letters
Disk Partitions
Active Partition
Bootable partition Only one can be active Must be a primary partition
Master Boot Record
Contains information about the physical drives partitions Written to the first sector of the first cylinder of the first head Persists no matter what high-level formatting is done to the drive
Clusters
Groups of sectors that are addressed as a group Makes storage access quicker since there are fewer units to address Allows larger drives to be addressed Wastes some space when cluster is not completely full Larger clusters are more wasteful
Default Cluster Sizes
Each file system has its own default cluster size rules (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) Cluster size can vary from 1 to 64 sectors Generally, smaller drive has smaller cluster size Refer to Tables 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 in textbook
Common File Systems
FAT16 FAT32 NTFS 4 NTFS 5
FAT Formatting
Creates the volume boot record:
Every logical drive has one Holds information about the partition Stores the boot files if a bootable drive Written to the first sector of the logical disk (the boot sector) At startup, OS looks to the boot sector to see if it contains startup files
FAT Formatting
Creates the File Allocation Table
Small database Two copies of it, for redundancy Tracks only the first cluster of each file Tracks only files and folders in the root directory
FAT Formatting
Reads information from low-level format about physical defects to avoid in disk surface Creates the root directory
Top-level folder All others are placed here
FAT16 versus FAT32
FAT16
Original FAT file system Uses 16-bit binary numbers to identify each cluster
FAT32
Improved version Uses 32-bit binary numbers to identify each cluster Drive sizes can be larger because there are more numbers available for cluster IDs
OS Compatibility of FAT
FAT16:
All MS-DOS and Windows versions
FAT32:
No support in MS-DOS, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 95 Windows 95C provides limited support (no conversion utility) Windows 98 and higher provide full support
NTFS
New Technology File System Developed for Windows NT (NTFS 4) Improved for Windows 2000 and higher (NTFS 5) 32-bit file system More sophisticated security permissions Encryption (NTFS 5)
NTFS Features
Volume Boot Record
Equivalent to Volume Boot Record in FAT32
Master File Table
Equivalent to File Allocation Table
System Files
No stand-alone command interpreter User interface separate from OS kernel
OS Compatibility of NTFS
No support in MS-DOS or 9x versions of Windows NTFS 4 supported in Windows NT 4.0 NTFS 5 supported in Windows 2000 and XP Conversion done automatically when upgrading from NT 4.0 to 2000 or XP
