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.
FIGURE 7.15 A Typical Rigid Disk Specification as Provided by a Disk
Drive Manufacturer
One final comment about the disk specification shown in Figure 7.15: You
can see that it also
includes estimates of disk reliability under the heading of “Reliability and
Maintenance.” According
to the manufacturer, this particular disk drive is designed to operate for five
years and tolerate being
stopped and started 50,000 times. Under the same heading, the mean time to
failure (MTTF) is
given as 300,000 hours. Surely this figure cannot be taken to mean that the
expected value of the disk
life is 300,000 hours—this is just over 34 years if the disk runs continuously.
The specification states
that the drive is designed to last only five years. This apparent anomaly owes
its existence to
statistical quality control methods commonly used in the manufacturing
industry. Unless the disk is
manufactured under a government contract, the exact method used for
calculating the MTTF is at the
discretion of the manufacturer. Usually the process involves taking random
samples from production
lines and running the disks under less-than-ideal conditions for a certain
number of hours, typically
more than 100. The number of failures are then plotted against probability
curves to obtain the
resulting MTTF figure. In short, the “design life” number is much more
credible and understandable.