Chapter 5: Storage Management-

Mass-Storage Systems
Lecture No. 33

IT – SE – OS

Prof. Bushra Shaikh

Asistant Professor
Dept. of InformationTechnology, 
SIES Graduate School of Technology

Prof. Bushra Shaikh 1

 Learning Objectives
• To take an Overview of Mass Storage Structure
• To discuss about Disk Structure
• To illustrate different Disk Scheduling Algorithms
• To illustrate different levels of RAID Structure

Prof. Bushra Shaikh 2

 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

• 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

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Moving-head Disk Mechanism

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 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

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 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
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 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

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 FCFS

Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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 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

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SSTF (Cont.)

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 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 236 cylinders
• But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest
density at other end of disk and those wait the longest

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SCAN (Cont.)

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 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

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C-SCAN (Cont.)

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 C-LOOK
• LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a 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

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C-LOOK (Cont.)

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 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

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 FCFS

• Suppose the order of request is-

(82,170,43,140,24,16,190)
• And current position of
Read/Write head is : 50

• So, total seek time:

• =(82-50)+(170-82)+(170-43)+(140-
43)+(140-24)+(24-16)+(190-16)
• =642

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 SSTF

• Suppose the order of request is-

(82,170,43,140,24,16,190)
• And current position of Read/Write head is :
50

• So, total seek time:

• =(50-43)+(43-24)+(24-16)+(82-16)+(140-
82)+(170-140)+(190-170)
• =208

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 SCAN

• Suppose the order of request is-

(82,170,43,140,24,16,190)
• And current position of Read/Write
head is : 50

• Therefore, the seek time is calculated

as:
• =(199-50)+(199-16)
=332

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 CSCAN

• Suppose the order of request is-

(82,170,43,140,24,16,190)
• And current position of Read/Write head is : 50

• Seek time is calculated as:

• =(199-50)+(199-0)+(43-0)
• =391

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 LOOK

• So, the seek time is calculated as:

• =(190-50)+(190-16)
=314

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 CLOOK

• Suppose the order of request is-

(82,170,43,140,24,16,190)
• And current position of Read/Write head
is : 50

• So, the seek time is calculated as:

• =(190-50)+(190-16)+(43-16)
=341

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 RAID Structure

• RAID – multiple disk drives provides reliability via

redundancy
• Increases the mean time to failure
• Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve
write performance
• RAID is arranged into six different levels

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 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 (RAID 1) keeps duplicate of each disk
– Striped mirrors (RAID 1+0) or mirrored stripes (RAID 0+1) provides high
performance and high reliability
– Block interleaved parity (RAID 4, 5, 6) uses much less redundancy
• RAID within a storage array can still fail if the array fails, so automatic replication of
the data between arrays is common
• Frequently, a small number of hot-spare disks are left unallocated, automatically
replacing a failed disk and having data rebuilt onto them

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RAID Levels

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RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)

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Chapter 5: Storage Management-
I/O Systems
Lecture No. 34

IT – SE – OS

Prof. Bushra Shaikh

Asistant Professor
Dept. of InformationTechnology, 
SIES Graduate School of Technology

Prof. Bushra Shaikh 29

 Learning Objectives
• To take an Overview of I/O Systems

• To discuss about I/O Hardware &Polling

• To illustrate Interrupts &Direct Memory Access

• To discuss about STREAMS

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 Overview

• I/O management is a major component of operating system

design and operation
– Important aspect of computer operation
– I/O devices vary greatly
– Various methods to control them
– Performance management
– New types of devices frequent
• Ports, busses, device controllers connect to various devices
• Device drivers encapsulate device details
– Present uniform device-access interface to I/O subsystem

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 I/O Hardware
• Incredible variety of I/O devices
– Storage
– Transmission
– Human-interface
• Common concepts – signals from I/O devices interface with
computer
– Port – connection point for device
– Bus - daisy chain or shared direct access
• PCI bus common in PCs and servers, PCI Express (PCIe)
• expansion bus connects relatively slow devices
– Controller (host adapter) – electronics that operate port, bus, device
• Sometimes integrated
• Sometimes separate circuit board (host adapter)

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A Typical PC Bus Structure

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 I/O Hardware (Cont.)
• I/O instructions control devices
• Devices usually have registers where device driver places commands,
addresses, and data to write, or read data from registers after command
execution
– Data-in register, data-out register, status register, control register
– Typically 1-4 bytes, or FIFO buffer
• Devices have addresses, used by
– Direct I/O instructions
– Memory-mapped I/O
• Device data and command registers mapped to processor address space
• Especially for large address spaces (graphics)

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Device I/O Port Locations on PCs (partial)

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 Polling
• For each byte of I/O
1. Read busy bit from status register until 0
2. Host sets read or write bit and if write copies data into data-out register
3. Host sets command-ready bit
4. Controller sets busy bit, executes transfer
5. Controller clears busy bit, error bit, command-ready bit when transfer
done
• Step 1 is busy-wait cycle to wait for I/O from device
– Reasonable if device is fast
– But inefficient if device slow
– CPU switches to other tasks?
But if miss a cycle data overwritten / lost

Prof. Bushra Shaikh

 Interrupts
• CPU Interrupt-request line triggered by I/O device
– Checked by processor after each instruction
• Interrupt handler receives interrupts
– Maskable to ignore or delay some interrupts
• Interrupt vector to dispatch interrupt to correct handler
• Interrupt mechanism also used for exceptions
– Terminate process, crash system due to hardware error
• Page fault executes when memory access error
• System call executes via trap to trigger kernel to execute
request

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Interrupt-Driven I/O Cycle

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Intel Pentium Processor Event-Vector Table

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 Direct Memory Access
• Used to avoid programmed I/O (one byte at a time) for large data movement
• Requires DMA controller
• Bypasses CPU to transfer data directly between I/O device and memory
• OS writes DMA command block into memory
– Source and destination addresses
– Read or write mode
– Count of bytes
– Writes location of command block to DMA controller
– Bus mastering of DMA controller – grabs bus from CPU
• Cycle stealing from CPU but still much more efficient
– When done, interrupts to signal completion
• Version that is aware of virtual addresses can be even more efficient - DVMA

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Six Step Process to Perform DMA Transfer

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 STREAMS

• STREAM – a full-duplex communication channel between a user-level process and a device in

Unix System V and beyond
• A STREAM consists of:

– STREAM head interfaces with the user process

– driver end interfaces with the device

– zero or more STREAM modules between them

• Each module contains a read queue and a write queue

• Message passing is used to communicate between queues

– Flow control option to indicate available or busy

• Asynchronous internally, synchronous where user process communicates with stream head

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The STREAMS Structure

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 Disk Management
• Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a disk into sectors
that the disk controller can read and write
• To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to record its own
data structures on the disk
– Partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders
– Logical formatting or “making a file system”
– To increase efficiency most file systems group blocks into clusters
• Disk I/O done in blocks
• File I/O done in clusters
• Boot block initializes system
– The bootstrap is stored in ROM
– Bootstrap loader program
• Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad blocks

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Booting from a Disk in Windows

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 Swap-Space Management
• Swap-space — Virtual memory uses disk space as an
extension of main memory
• Swap-space can be carved out of the normal file system,
or, more commonly, it can be in a separate disk partition
• Swap-space management
– 4.3BSD allocates swap space when process starts; holds
text segment (the program) and data segment
– Kernel uses swap maps to track swap-space use
– Solaris 2 allocates swap space only when a page is
forced out of physical memory, not when the virtual
memory page is first created

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