Chapter 10.

C:
Mass-Storage Systems

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“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. Chapter 10, OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT
 Outline

 Overview of Mass Storage Structure

 HDD Scheduling

 NVM Scheduling

 Error Detection and Correction

 Storage Device Management

 Swap-Space Management

 Storage Attachment

 RAID Structure

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 Objectives

 Describe the physical structure of secondary storage

devices and the effect of a device’s structure on its
uses
 Explain the performance characteristics of mass-
storage devices
 Evaluate I/O scheduling algorithms

 Discuss operating-system services provided for mass

storage, including RAID

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 Overview of Mass Storage Structure

 Bulk of secondary storage for modern computers is

hard disk drives (HDDs) and nonvolatile memory (NVM)
devices
 HDDs spin platters of magnetically-coated material
under moving read-write heads
 Disks can be removable
 Head crash results from disk head making contact with the
disk surface
 That’s bad
 Performance
 Drive rotation is at 60 to 250 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
4 time) and timeOSfor
Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,
“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. desired
Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

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 Example of Hard Disk Drives

 Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)

 Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”

 Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive

 Performance

 Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec

 Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec
 Seek time from 3ms to 12ms (e.g., 9ms is common for
desktop drives)
 Average seek time is measured or calculated based on 1/3 of
tracks

 Latency based on spindle speed

 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
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 Hard Disk Performance

 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek

time + average rotational latency
 For fastest disk: 3ms + 2ms = 5ms
 For slow disk: 9ms + 5.56ms = 14.56ms
 Average I/O time = average access time + (amount to
transfer / transfer rate) + controller overhead
 For example, to transfer a 4KB block on a 7200 RPM
disk with a 5ms average seek time, 1Gb/sec transfer
rate with a 0.1ms controller overhead, the average I/O
time for 4KB block is
 = 5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time
 Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s = [4*8 (KB) *1000 (ms)]/ 1024 2 (KB)
= 0.031 ms
 = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms
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 Nonvolatile Memory Devices

 If disk-drive like, then called solid-state disks (SSDs)

 Other forms include USB drives (thumb drive, flash

drive), DRAM disk replacements, surface-mounted on
motherboards, and main storage in devices like
smartphones
 Busses can be too slow –> connect directly to PCIe for
example
 No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational latency
 Can be more reliable than HDDs
 More expensive per MB
 Maybe have shorter life span – need careful management
 Less capacity
Some slides
 from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,
But much faster
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 Nonvolatile Memory Devices (Cont.)

 Have characteristics that present challenges

 Read and written in “page” increments (think sector)

but can’t overwrite in place
 Must first be erased, and erases happen in larger ”block”
increments
 Can only be erased a limited number of times before worn
out ~ 100,000

 E.g.,
 Life
A span measured
1TB NAND in drive writes per day (DWPD)
drive
with rating of 5DWPD is
expected to have 5TB per
day written within
warrantee period without
failing

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 NAND Flash Controller Algorithms

 With no overwrite, pages end up with mix of valid and

invalid data
 To track which logical blocks are valid, controller
maintains flash translation layer (FTL) table
 Also implements garbage collection (GC) to free invalid
page space
 Allocates overprovisioning to provide working space for
GC
 Each cell has lifespan, so wear leveling needed to write
equally to all cells

NAND block with valid and invalid pages

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 Volatile Memory

 DRAM frequently used as mass-storage device

 Not technically secondary storage because volatile, but
can have file systems, be used like very fast secondary
storage
 RAM drives (with many names, including RAM disks)
present as raw block devices, commonly file system
formatted
 Found in all major operating systems
 Linux /dev/ram, macOS diskutil to create them, Solaris /tmp of
file system type tmpfs
 Computers have buffering, caching via RAM, so why RAM
drives?
 Caches / buffers allocated / managed by programmer, operating
system, hardware
 RAM drives under user control
 Used as high speed temporary storage
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 Disk Attachment

 Host-attached storage accessed through I/O ports

talking to I/O busses. Several busses available,
including advanced technology attachment (ATA), serial
ATA (SATA), eSATA, serial attached SCSI (SAS),
universal serial bus (USB), and fibre channel (FC)
 Because NVM much faster than HDD, new fast interface for
NVM called NVM express (NVMe), connecting directly to
PCI bus
 Data transfers on a bus carried out by special
electronic processors called controllers (or host-bus
adapters, HBAs)
 Host controller on the computer end of the bus, device
controller on device end
 Computer places command on host controller, using
memory-mapped I/O ports
 Host controller sends messages to device controller
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 Address Mapping

 Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays

of logical blocks, where the logical block is the
smallest unit of transfer
 Low-level formatting creates logical blocks on physical
media
 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
 Logical to physical address should be easy
 Except for bad sectors
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 Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. 15 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 HDD Scheduling

 The operating system is responsible for using hardware

efficiently — for the disk drives, this means having a
fast access time and disk bandwidth
 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
 Minimize seek time

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“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. 16 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)

 There are many sources of disk I/O request

 OS
 System processes
 Users processes
 I/O request includes input or output mode, disk address,
memory address, number of sectors to transfer
 OS maintains queue of requests, per disk or device
 Idle disk can immediately work on I/O request, busy
disk means work must queue
 Optimization algorithms only make sense when a queue
exists
 In the past, operating system responsible for queue
management, disk drive head scheduling
 Now, built into the storage devices, controllers
Just provide LBAs, handle
Some slides
17
sorting of requests
 from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,
“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)

 Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can

manage a queue of I/O requests (of varying “depth”)
 Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of
disk I/O requests
 The analysis is true for one or many platters

 E.g., We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request

queue (0-199)
 98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67
 Head pointer –> 53

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 First Come First Served (FCFS)

 Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

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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
 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.)

 Illustration shows total head movement of 208 cylinders

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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.)

 Total number of cylinders?

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 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm

 FCFS is common and has a natural appeal

 SCAN and C-SCAN perform better for systems that
place a heavy load on the disk (less starvation, but still
possible)
 To avoid starvation Linux implements deadline
scheduler
 Maintains separate read and write queues, gives read
priority
 Because processes more likely to block on read than write
 Implements four queues: 2 x read and 2 x write
 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in LBA order, (implementing C-
SCAN)
 1 read and 1 write queue sorted in FCFS order
 All I/O requests sent in batch sorted in that queue’s order
 After each batch, checks if any requests in FCFS older than
Some slides fromconfigured
the Silberschatz,age
Galvin(default
and Gagne, 500ms)
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 NVM Scheduling

 No disk heads or rotational latency but still room for

optimization
 In RHEL 7, NOOP (no scheduling) is used but adjacent
LBA requests are combined
 NVM best at random I/O, HDD at sequential
 Throughput can be similar
 Input/Output operations per second (IOPS) much higher
with NVM (hundreds of thousands vs hundreds)
 But write amplification (one write, causing garbage
collection and many read/writes) can decrease the
performance advantage

Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,

“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. 25 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Error Detection and Correction

 Fundamental aspect of many parts of computing

(memory, networking, storage)
 Error detection determines if there a problem has
occurred (for example a bit flipping)
 If detected, can halt the operation
 Detection frequently done via parity bit
 Parity – one form of checksum – uses modular arithmetic to
compute, store, compare values of fixed-length words
 Another error-detection method common in networking is
Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) which uses hash function
to detect multiple-bit errors
 Error-correction code (ECC) not only detects, but can
correct some errors
 Soft errors correctable, hard errors detected but not
corrected
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 Storage Attachment

 Computers access storage in three ways

 host-attached
 network-attached
 cloud
 Host attached access through local I/O ports, using one
of several technologies
 To attach many devices, use storage busses such as USB,
firewire, thunderbolt
 High-end systems use fibre channel (FC)
 High-speed serial architecture using fibre or copper cables

 Multiple hosts and storage devices can connect to the FC

fabric
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 Network-Attached Storage

 Network-attached storage (NAS) is storage made

available over a network rather than over a local
connection (such as a bus)
 Remotely attaching to file systems
 NFS and CIFS are common protocols
 Implemented via remote procedure calls (RPCs)
between host and storage over typically TCP or UDP on
IP network
 iSCSI protocol uses IP network to carry the SCSI
protocol
 Remotely attaching to devices (blocks)

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 Cloud Storage

 Similar to NAS, provides access to storage across a

network
 Unlike NAS, accessed over the Internet or a WAN to remote
data center
 NAS presented as just another file system, while cloud
storage is API based, with programs using the APIs to
provide access
 Examples include Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft
OneDrive, Apple iCloud
 Use APIs because of latency and failure scenarios (NAS
protocols wouldn’t work well)

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“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. 33 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Storage Array

 Can just attach disks, or arrays of disks

 Avoids the NAS drawback of using network bandwidth

 Storage Array has controller(s), provides features to

attached host(s)
 Ports to connect hosts to array
 Memory, controlling software (sometimes NVRAM, etc)
 A few to thousands of disks
 RAID, hot spares, hot swap (discussed later)
 Shared storage -> more efficiency
 Features found in some file systems
 Snaphots, clones, thin provisioning, replication, deduplication,
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 RAID Structure

 RAID – redundant array of inexpensive disks

 multiple disk drives provides reliability via redundancy
 Increases the mean time to failure
 Mean time to repair – exposure time when another
failure could cause data loss
 Mean time to data loss based on above factors
 If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with
1300,000 mean time to failure and 10 hour mean time to
repair
 Mean time to data loss is 100, 0002 / (2 ∗ 10) = 500 ∗ 106
hours, or 57,000 years!
 Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve write
performance
 Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve
the use of multiple disks 37
working cooperatively
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 RAID (Cont.)

 Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage unit

 RAID is arranged into six different levels

 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
Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,

“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. 38 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Traditional and Pooled Storage

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 Object Storage

 General-purpose computing, file  Object storage

systems not sufficient for very management
large scale software like
Hadoop file system
 Another approach – start with a
(HDFS) and Ceph
storage pool and place objects in determine where
it to store objects,
 Object just a container of data manages
 No way to navigate the pool to protection
find objects (no directory  Typically by
structures, few services) storing N copies,
 Computer-oriented, not user- across N
oriented systems, in the
object storage
 Typical sequence cluster
 Create an object within the pool,  Horizontally
Some slidesreceive an object
from the Silberschatz, IDGagne,
Galvin and scalable
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 Summary

 Hard disk drives and nonvolatile memory devices are

themajor secondary storage I/O units on most
computers. Modern secondary storage is structured as
large one-dimensional arrays of logical blocks.
 Drives of either type may be attached to a computer
system in one of three ways: (1) through the local I/O
ports on the host computer, (2) directly connected to
motherboards, or (3) through a communications
network or storage network connection.
 Requests for secondary storage I/O are generated by
the file system and by the virtual memory system. Each
request specifies the address on the device to be
referenced in the form of a logical block number.

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 Summary (Cont.)

 Disk-scheduling algorithms can improve the effective

bandwidth of HDDs, the average response time, and the
variance in response time. Algorithms such as SCAN
and C-SCAN are designed to make such improvements
through strategies for disk-queue ordering.
Performance of disks cheduling algorithms can vary
greatly on hard disks. In contrast, because solid-state
disks have no moving parts, performance varies little
among scheduling algorithms, and quite often a simple
FCFS strategy is used.
 Data storage and transmission are complex and
frequently result in errors. Error detection attempts to
spot such problems to alert the system for corrective
action and to avoid error propagation. Error correction
can detect and repair problems, depending on the
amount of correction data available and the amount of
Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,
data
“Operating that
System was
Concepts”,
th
10 corrupted.
eds, 2018. 46 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Summary (Cont.)

 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.
Finally, when a block or page is corrupted, the system
must have a way to lock out that block or to replace it
logically with a spare.
 An efficient swap space is a key to good performance in
some systems. Some systems dedicate a raw partition
to swap space, and others use a file within the file
Some system
slides from the instead. Still
Silberschatz, Galvin other
and Gagne, systems allow the user or
“Operating System Concepts”, 10 eds, 2018.
th 47 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 Summary (Cont.)

 Because of the amount of storage required on large

systems, and because storage devices fail in various
ways, secondary storage devices are frequently made
redundant via RAID algorithms. These algorithms allow
more than one drive to be used for a given operation
and allow continued operation and even automatic
recovery in the face of a drive failure. RAID algorithms
are organized into different levels; each level provides
some combination of reliability and high transfer rates.
 Object storage is used for big data problems such as
indexing the Internet and cloud photo storage. Objects
are self-defining collections of data, addressed by
object ID rather than file name. Typically it uses
replication for data protection, computes based on the
data on systems where a copy of the data exists, and is
horizontally scalable for vast capacity and easy
Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,
expansion.
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th 48 OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT ©2022
 End of Chapter 10.C.

Some slides from the Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne,

“Operating System Concepts”, 10th eds, 2018. Chapter 10, OS Slides, CSE-HCMUT