RAID Structure

• RAID – multiple disk drives provides reliability

via redundancy.

• RAID is arranged into six different levels.

 RAID (cont)
• Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve
the use of multiple disks working cooperatively.

• Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage unit.

• RAID schemes improve performance and improve the

reliability of the storage system by storing redundant
data.
– Mirroring or shadowing keeps duplicate of each disk.
– Block interleaved parity uses much less redundancy.
RAID Levels
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
 Stable-Storage Implementation
• Write-ahead log scheme requires stable
storage.

• To implement stable storage:

– Replicate information on more than one
nonvolatile storage media with independent
failure modes.
– Update information in a controlled manner to
ensure that we can recover the stable data after
any failure during data transfer or recovery.
 Tertiary Storage Devices
• Low cost is the defining characteristic of
tertiary storage.

• Generally, tertiary storage is built using

removable media

• Common examples of removable media are

floppy disks and CD-ROMs; other types are
available.
 Removable Disks
• Floppy disk — thin flexible disk coated with
magnetic material, enclosed in a protective
plastic case.

– Most floppies hold about 1 MB; similar

technology is used for removable disks that
hold more than 1 GB.
– Removable magnetic disks can be nearly as fast
as hard disks, but they are at a greater risk of
damage from exposure.
 Removable Disks (Cont.)
• A magneto-optic disk records data on a rigid
platter coated with magnetic material.
– Laser heat is used to amplify a large, weak magnetic
field to record a bit.
– Laser light is also used to read data (Kerr effect).
– The magneto-optic head flies much farther from the
disk surface than a magnetic disk head, and the
magnetic material is covered with a protective layer
of plastic or glass; resistant to head crashes.

• Optical disks do not use magnetism; they employ

special materials that are altered by laser light.
 WORM Disks
• The data on read-write disks can be modified over and
over.
• WORM (“Write Once, Read Many Times”) disks can be
written only once.
• Thin aluminum film sandwiched between two glass or
plastic platters.
• To write a bit, the drive uses a laser light to burn a
small hole through the aluminum; information can be
destroyed by not altered.
• Very durable and reliable.
• Read Only disks, such ad CD-ROM and DVD, com from
the factory with the data pre-recorded.
 Tapes
• Compared to a disk, a tape is less expensive and holds more
data, but random access is much slower.
• Tape is an economical medium for purposes that do not
require fast random access, e.g., backup copies of disk
data, holding huge volumes of data.
• Large tape installations typically use robotic tape changers
that move tapes between tape drives and storage slots in a
tape library.
– stacker – library that holds a few tapes
– silo – library that holds thousands of tapes
• A disk-resident file can be archived to tape for low cost
storage; the computer can stage it back into disk storage
for active use.
 Operating System Issues
• Major OS jobs are to manage physical devices
and to present a virtual machine abstraction
to applications

• For hard disks, the OS provides two

abstraction:
– Raw device – an array of data blocks.
– File system – the OS queues and schedules the
interleaved requests from several applications.
 Application Interface
• Most OSs handle removable disks almost exactly like fixed
disks — a new cartridge is formatted and an empty file
system is generated on the disk.
• Tapes are presented as a raw storage medium, i.e., and
application does not not open a file on the tape, it opens
the whole tape drive as a raw device.
• Usually the tape drive is reserved for the exclusive use of
that application.
• Since the OS does not provide file system services, the
application must decide how to use the array of blocks.
• Since every application makes up its own rules for how to
organize a tape, a tape full of data can generally only be
used by the program that created it.
 Tape Drives
• The basic operations for a tape drive differ from those
of a disk drive.
• locate positions the tape to a specific logical block, not
an entire track (corresponds to seek).
• The read position operation returns the logical block
number where the tape head is.
• The space operation enables relative motion.
• Tape drives are “append-only” devices; updating a
block in the middle of the tape also effectively erases
everything beyond that block.
• An EOT mark is placed after a block that is written.
 File Naming
• The issue of naming files on removable media is
especially difficult when we want to write data
on a removable cartridge on one computer, and
then use the cartridge in another computer.
• Contemporary OSs generally leave the name
space problem unsolved for removable media,
and depend on applications and users to figure
out how to access and interpret the data.
• Some kinds of removable media (e.g., CDs) are so
well standardized that all computers use them
the same way.
 Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)

• A hierarchical storage system extends the storage

hierarchy beyond primary memory and secondary
storage to incorporate tertiary storage — usually
implemented as a jukebox of tapes or removable disks.
• Usually incorporate tertiary storage by extending the
file system.
– Small and frequently used files remain on disk.
– Large, old, inactive files are archived to the jukebox.
• HSM is usually found in supercomputing centers and
other large installations that have enormous volumes
of data.
 Speed
• Two aspects of speed in tertiary storage are
bandwidth and latency.

• Bandwidth is measured in bytes per second.

– Sustained bandwidth – average data rate during a
large transfer; # of bytes/transfer time.
Data rate when the data stream is actually flowing.
– Effective bandwidth – average over the entire I/O
time, including seek or locate, and cartridge
switching.
Drive’s overall data rate.
 Speed (Cont.)
• Access latency – amount of time needed to locate data.
– Access time for a disk – move the arm to the selected cylinder
and wait for the rotational latency; < 35 milliseconds.
– Access on tape requires winding the tape reels until the selected
block reaches the tape head; tens or hundreds of seconds.
– Generally say that random access within a tape cartridge is
about a thousand times slower than random access on disk.
• The low cost of tertiary storage is a result of having many
cheap cartridges share a few expensive drives.
• A removable library is best devoted to the storage of
infrequently used data, because the library can only satisfy a
relatively small number of I/O requests per hour.
 Reliability
• A fixed disk drive is likely to be more reliable than
a removable disk or tape drive.

• An optical cartridge is likely to be more reliable

than a magnetic disk or tape.

• A head crash in a fixed hard disk generally

destroys the data, whereas the failure of a tape
drive or optical disk drive often leaves the data
cartridge unharmed.
 Cost
• Main memory is much more expensive than disk storage

• The cost per megabyte of hard disk storage is competitive

with magnetic tape if only one tape is used per drive.

• The cheapest tape drives and the cheapest disk drives have
had about the same storage capacity over the years.

• Tertiary storage gives a cost savings only when the number

of cartridges is considerably larger than the number of
drives.
Price per Megabyte of DRAM, From 1981 to 2004
Price per Megabyte of Magnetic Hard Disk, From 1981 to 2004
Price per Megabyte of a Tape Drive, From 1984-2000