Chapter 12: Mass-Storage

Systems

Operating System Concepts – 8th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2009
 Chapter 12: Mass-Storage Systems
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Disk Structure
 Disk Attachment
 Disk Scheduling
 Disk Management
 Swap-Space Management

12.2
 Objectives
 Describe the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage
devices and the resulting effects on the uses of the devices

 Explain the performance characteristics of mass-storage devices

12.3
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary storage of modern computers
 Drives rotate at 60 to 200 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
 Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk controller built
into drive or storage array

12.4
Moving-head Disk Mechanism

12.5
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure (Cont.)

 Magnetic tape
 Was early secondary-storage medium
 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
 20-200GB typical storage
 Common technologies are 4mm, 8mm, 19mm, LTO-2 and SDLT

12.6
 Disk Structure
 Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays of logical
blocks, where the logical block is the smallest unit of transfer

 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

12.7
 Disk Attachment
 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports talking to I/O busses

 SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one cable, SCSI initiator requests

operation and SCSI targets perform tasks
 Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks attached to device
controller

 FC is high-speed serial architecture

 Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space – the basis of storage
area networks (SANs) in which many hosts attach to many storage
units
 Can be arbitrated loop (FC-AL) of 126 devices

12.8
 Network-Attached Storage
 Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made available over a
network rather than over a local connection (such as a bus)
 NFS and CIFS are common protocols
 Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs) between host and
storage
 New iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI protocol

12.9
 Storage Area Network
 Common in large storage environments (and becoming more common)

 Multiple hosts attached to multiple storage arrays - flexible

12.10
 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

 Access time has two major components

 Seek time is the time for the disk are to move the heads to the
cylinder containing the desired sector
 Rotational latency is the additional time waiting for the disk to
rotate the desired sector to the disk head

 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

12.11
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
 Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of disk I/O requests

 We illustrate them with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

Head pointer 53
Total head movement 640 cylinders

12.12
 FCFS

Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

12.13
 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

12.14
SSTF (Cont.)

12.15
 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

12.16
SCAN (Cont.)

12.17
 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

12.18
C-SCAN (Cont.)

12.19
 C-LOOK
 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

12.20
C-LOOK (Cont.)

12.21
 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

 Performance depends on the number and types of requests

 Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation

method

 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

 Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm

12.22
Suppose that a disk drive has 5,000 cylinders, numbered 0 to 4,999. The drive is
currently serving a request at cylinder 150, and the previous request was at
cylinder 805. The queue of pending requests, in FIFO
order, is:
069, 212, 296, 800, 544, 618, 356, 523, 965, 3681
Starting from the current head position, what is the total distance (in cylinders) that
the disk arm moves to satisfy all the pending requests for each of the following
disk-scheduling algorithms?
a. FCFS
b. SSTF
c. SCAN
d. LOOK
e. C-SCAN
f. C-LOOK

12.23