COEN 308 – Operating Systems

Module IV: Physical and Virtual Storage Management

Lecturer: Engr. A. D. Adekale

Department of Computer Engineering, Ahmadu Bello

University – 2019/2020 session
Mass Storage
Also known as non-volatile storage. Mass storage is a type
of computer memory that can retain stored information
even after power is removed.
Most Modern computer systems have two common mass
storage system that for the secondary storage of the
computer. They are:
• Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)
• Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) devices

10/17/2021 Department of Computer Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.

NVM devices vs HDDs
• NVM devices can be more reliable than HDDs because they
have no moving parts
• NVM devices can be faster because they have no seek time
or rotational latency.
• NVM devices consume less power.
• NVM devices are more expensive per megabyte than HDDs
• NVM devices have less capacity than the larger hard disks.

10/17/2021 Department of Computer Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.

Secondary Storage Connection Methods
A secondary storage device is attached to a computer by the
system bus or an I/O bus. Several kinds of buses are available,
including advanced technology attachment (ATA), serial ATA
(SATA), eSATA, serial attached SCSI (SAS), universal serial
bus (USB), and fibr channel (FC).
Note: The most common connection method is SATA. Because
NVM devices are much faster than HDDs, the industry created
a special, fast interface for NVM devices called NVM express
(NVMe).
10/17/2021 Department of Computer Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
Storage Device Management
 Drive Initialization
 Booting from a drive
 Bad-Block recovery

Storage devices are partitioned into one or more chunks of

space. Each partition can hold a volume or be part of a
multidevice volume. File systems are created in volumes. The
operating system manages the storage device’s blocks. New
devices typically come pre-formatted. The device is partitioned,
file systems are created, and boot blocks are allocated to store
the system’s bootstrap program if the device will contain an
operating system.

What is ECC?

10/17/2021
Department of Computer Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
Storage Attachment
Computers access secondary storage in three ways:
• Host-attached storage
• Network-attached storage
• Cloud storage

Examples of the different secondary storage mentioned?

10/17/2021 Department of Computer

Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
 StorageAreaNetwork
A storage-area network (SAN) is a private network (using
storage protocols rather than networking protocols)
connecting servers and storage units. The power of a SAN
lies in its flexibility. Multiple hosts and multiple storage
arrays can attach to the same SAN, and storage can be
dynamically allocated to hosts. The storage arrays can be
RAID protected or unprotected drives (Just a Bunch of Disks
(JBOD)).

10/17/2021 Department of Computer

Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
RAID
This is a collection of disk-organization techniques used to
address the performance and reliability issues in data storage.
RAIDs stands for Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks.

RAID Mirroring provides high reliability, but it is expensive.

Striping provides high data-transfer rates, but it does not
improve reliability. Numerous schemes to provide redundancy
at lower cost by using disk striping combined with “parity” bits
have been proposed. These schemes have different cost–
performance trade-offs and are classified according to levels
called RAID levels.

10/17/2021 Department of Computer

Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
RAID Levels
Some common RAID levels are:
• RAID 0
RAID level 0 refers to drive arrays with striping at the level of blocks but
without any redundancy (such as mirroring or parity bits).
• RAID 1
RAID level 1 refers to drive mirroring.
• RAID 5
This consists of block-level striping with distributed parity. The parity
information is distributed among the drives. It requires that all drives but one
be present to operate.
• RAID 6
RAID 6 is a type of RAID level that utilizes block-level striping and distributes
two parity blocks on each disk within the array.
• RAID 10 (or RAID 1+0)
RAID level 1 + 0 refers to a combination of RAID levels 0 and 1. RAID 0
provides the performance, while RAID 1 provides the reliability

10/17/2021 Department of Computer

Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.
 THANK YOU

10/17/2021 Department of Computer

Engineering, ABU, Zaria, Nigeria.