Secondary Memory Management

Subject – Computer Operating System

Course BCA III

by
Vishwa Nand Chandra

Department of Computer Science

Platinum College of Professional Studies
(Affiliated to PRSU )
 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
 That’s bad
 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
 Magnetic tape
• Was early secondary-storage medium
• Relatively permanent and holds large quantities of data
• Access time slow
• Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
• Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used
data, transfer medium between systems
• Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write
head
• Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
• 20-200GB typical storage
• Common technologies are 4mm, 8mm, 19mm, LTO-2 and
SDLT
 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.
 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O
ports talking to I/O busses
 SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one
cable, SCSI initiator requests operation and
SCSI targets perform tasks
• Each target can have up to 8 logical units (disks
attached to device controller
 FC is high-speed serial architecture
• Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address space –
the basis of storage area networks (SANs) in which
many hosts attach to many storage units
• Can be arbitrated loop (FC-AL) of 126 devices
 Network-attached storage (NAS) is
storage made available over a network
rather than over a local connection (such
as a bus)
 NFS and CIFS are common protocols
 Implemented via remote procedure calls
(RPCs) between host and storage
 New iSCSI protocol uses IP network to
carry the SCSI protocol
 Common in large storage environments
(and becoming more common)
 Multiple hosts attached to multiple
storage arrays - flexible
 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.
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.
 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.
 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.
 MajorOS 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.
 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.
 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.
 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.
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.
 Twoaspects 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.
 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.
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.
 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.
Thank You !
 Feedback is welcome !

 Any suggestions !

 Any Queries !