Because the disk directory must be read prior to every data read or write

operation, the location

of the directory can have a significant effect on the overall performance of
the disk drive. Outermost
tracks have the lowest bit density per areal measure; hence, they are less
prone to bit errors than the
innermost tracks. To ensure the best reliability, disk directories can be placed
at the outermost track,
track 0. This means, for every access, the arm has to swing out to track 0 and
then back to the required
data track. Performance therefore suffers from the wide arc made by the
access arms.
Improvements in recording technology and error-correction algorithms
permit the directory to be
placed in the location that gives the best performance: at the innermost track.
This substantially
reduces arm movement, giving the best possible throughput. Some, but not
all, modern systems take
advantage of center track directory placement.
Directory placement is one of the elements of the logical organization of a
disk. A disk’s logical
organization is a function of the operating system that uses it. A major
component of this logical
organization is the way in which sectors are mapped. Fixed disks contain so
many sectors that
keeping tabs on each one is infeasible. Consider the disk described in our
data sheet. Each track
contains 746 sectors. There are 48,000 tracks per surface and 8 surfaces on
the disk. This means there
are more than 286 million sectors on the disk. An allocation table listing the
status of each sector (the
status being recorded in 1 byte) would therefore consume more than 200MB
of disk space. Not only
is this a lot of disk space spent for overhead, but reading this data structure
would consume an
inordinate amount of time whenever we needed to check the status of a
sector. (This is a frequently
executed task.) For this reason, operating systems address sectors in groups,
called blocks or
clusters, to make file management simpler. The number of sectors per block
determines the size of the
allocation table. The smaller the size of the allocation block, the less wasted
space there is when a
file doesn’t fill the entire block; however, smaller block sizes make the
allocation tables larger and
slower. We will look deeper into the relationship between directories and file
allocation structures in
our discussion of floppy disks in the next section.