Disks & RAIDs
Slides Courtesy of Mary Jane Irwin ( [Link]/~mji )
[Link]/~cg431
With Modifications by Nathan Sprague
[Adapted from Computer Organization and Design, Patterson & Hennessy, ©
2005]
Magnetic Disk
Purpose Sector
● Long term, nonvolatile storage
● Lowest level in the memory hierarchy
- slow, large, inexpensive
General structure Track
● A rotating platter coated with a magnetic surface
● A moveable read/write head to access the information on the disk
Typical numbers
● 1 to 5 (1 or 2 surface) platters per disk of 1” to 5.25” in diameter
● Rotational speeds of 5,400 to 15,000 RPM
● 10,000 to 50,000 tracks per surface
- cylinder - all the tracks under the head at a given point on all surfaces
● 100 to 500 sectors per track
- the smallest unit that can be read/written (typically 512B)
Magnetic Disk Characteristic
Disk read/write components Controller
Track
1. Seek time: position the head over the + Sector
Cache
proper track (3 to 14 ms avg)
- due to locality of disk references Cylinder
the actual average seek time may
be only 25% to 33% of the
advertised number Platter
Head
2. Rotational latency: wait for the desired sector to rotate under
the head (½ of 1/RPM converted to ms)
- 0.5/5400RPM = 5.6ms to 0.5/15000RPM = 2.0ms
3. Transfer time: transfer a block of bits (one or more sectors)
under the head to the disk controller’s cache (30 to 100 MB/s
are typical disk transfer rates)
- the disk controller’s “cache” takes advantage of spatial locality in
disk accesses
– cache transfer rates are much faster (e.g., 320 MB/s)
4. Controller time: the overhead the disk controller imposes in
performing a disk I/O access (typically < .2 ms)
Typical Disk Access Time
The average time to read or write a 512B sector for a
disk rotating at 10,000RPM with average seek time of
6ms, a 50MB/sec transfer rate, and a 0.2ms controller
overhead
Avg disk read/write = 6.0ms + 0.5/(10000RPM/(60sec/minute) )+
0.5KB/(50MB/sec) + 0.2ms = 6.0 + 3.0 + 0.01 + 0.2 = 9.21ms
If the measured average seek time is 25% of the
advertised average seek time, then
Avg disk read/write = 1.5 + 3.0 + 0.01 + 0.2 = 4.71ms
The rotational latency is usually the largest component of
the access time
Solid State Drives
Flash memory – non-volatile storage that uses transistor
based memory cells.
● nor flash – fast reads, slow writes
- Frequently used for EEPROM
● nand flash – slower reads, faster writes, higher density
- Used for drives and general storage
Limited to approximately 100,000 – 1,000,000 write cycles
● Drives incorporate load-leveling logic.
No rotational or seek latency.
More expensive than traditional drives (2009)
● SSD: About $3.00/GB (120GB drive)
● Disk: About $.10/GB (1TB drive)
Let's compare some data sheets...
Dependability, Reliability, Availability
Reliability – measured by the mean time to failure
(MTTF).
Service interruption is measured by mean time to repair
(MTTR)
Availability – a measure of service accomplishment
Availability = MTTF/(MTTF + MTTR)
To increase MTTF, either improve the quality of the
components or design the system to continue operating
in the presence of faulty components
1. Fault avoidance: preventing fault occurrence by construction
2. Fault tolerance: using redundancy to correct or bypass faulty
components
RAIDs: Disk Arrays
Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Disks
Arrays of small and inexpensive disks
● Increase potential throughput by having many disk drives
- Data is spread over multiple disk
- Multiple accesses are made to several disks at a time
Reliability is lower than a single disk
But availability can be improved by adding redundant
disks (RAID)
● Lost information can be reconstructed from redundant information
● MTTR: mean time to repair is in the order of hours
● MTTF: mean time to failure of disks is tens of years
RAID: Level 0 (No Redundancy; Striping)
blk1 blk2 blk3 blk4
Multiple smaller disks as opposed to one big disk
● Spreading the blocks over multiple disks – striping – means that
multiple blocks can be accessed in parallel increasing the
performance
- A 4 disk system gives four times the throughput of a 1 disk system
● Same cost as one big disk – assuming 4 small disks cost the
same as one big disk
No redundancy, so what if one disk fails?
● Failure of one or more disks is more likely as the number of disks
in the system increases
RAID: Level 1 (Redundancy via Mirroring)
blk1.1 blk1.2 blk1.3 blk1.4 blk1.1 blk1.2 blk1.3 blk1.4
redundant (check) data
Uses twice as many disks as RAID 0 (e.g., 8 smaller
disks with second set of 4 duplicating the first set) so
there are always two copies of the data
● # redundant disks = # of data disks so twice the cost of one big
disk
- writes have to be made to both sets of disks, so writes would be
only 1/2 the performance of RAID 0
What if one disk fails?
● If a disk fails, the system just goes to the “mirror” for the data
RAID: Level 0+1 (Striping with Mirroring)
blk1 blk2 blk3 blk4 blk1 blk2 blk3 blk4
redundant (check) data
Combines the best of RAID 0 and RAID 1, data is striped
across four disks and mirrored to four disks
● Four times the throughput (due to striping)
● # redundant disks = # of data disks so twice the cost of one big
disk
- writes have to be made to both sets of disks, so writes would be
only 1/2 the performance of RAID 0
What if one disk fails?
● If a disk fails, the system just goes to the “mirror” for the data
RAID: Level 3 (Bit-Interleaved Parity)
blk1,b0 blk1,b1 blk1,b2 blk1,b3
1 0 1 0
parity disk
Cost of higher availability is reduced to 1/N where N is
the number of disks in a protection group
● # redundant disks = 1 × # of protection groups
- writes require writing the new data to the data disk as well as
computing the parity, meaning reading the other disks, so that the
parity disk can be updated
Can tolerate limited disk failure, since the data can be
reconstructed
RAID: Level 3 (Bit-Interleaved Parity)
blk1,b0 blk1,b1 blk1,b2 blk1,b3
1 0 1 0 1
disk fails parity disk
Cost of higher availability is reduced to 1/N where N is
the number of disks in a protection group
● # redundant disks = 1 × # of protection groups
- writes require writing the new data to the data disk as well as
computing the parity, meaning reading the other disks, so that the
parity disk can be updated
Can tolerate limited disk failure, since the data can be
reconstructed
RAID: Level 4 (Block-Interleaved Parity)
blk1 blk2 blk3 blk4
block
parity disk
Cost of higher availability still only 1/N but the parity is
stored as blocks associated with sets of data blocks
● Four times the throughput (striping)
● # redundant disks = 1 × # of protection groups
● Supports “small reads” and “small writes” (reads and writes that
go to just one (or a few) data disk in a protection group)
- by watching which bits change when writing new information, need
only to change the corresponding bits on the parity disk
- the parity disk must be updated on every write, so it is a bottleneck
for back-to-back writes
Can tolerate limited disk failure, since the data can be
reconstructed
Small Writes
RAID 3 small writes
New D1 data
D1 D2 D3 D4 P
⊕
3 reads and
2 writes
involving all D1 D2 D3 D4 P
the disks
RAID 4 small writes
New D1 data
D1 D2 D3 D4 P
⊕
2 reads and ⊕
2 writes
involving just
two disks D1 D2 D3 D4 P
RAID: Level 5 (Distributed Block-Interleaved
Parity)
one of these assigned as the block parity disk
Cost of higher availability still only 1/N but the parity block
can be located on any of the disks so there is no single
bottleneck for writes
● Still four times the throughput (striping)
● # redundant disks = 1 × # of protection groups
● Supports “small reads” and “small writes” (reads and writes that
go to just one (or a few) data disk in a protection group)
● Allows multiple simultaneous writes as long as the
accompanying parity blocks are not located on the same disk
Can tolerate limited disk failure, since the data can be
reconstructed
Distributing Parity Blocks
RAID 4 RAID 5
1 2 3 4 P0 1 2 3 4 P0
5 6 7 8 P1 5 6 7 P1 8
9 10 11 12 P2 9 10 P2 11 12
13 14 15 16 P3 13 P3 14 15 16
By distributing parity blocks to all disks, some small
writes can be performed in parallel
