Chapter 11: Mass-Storage Systems
Chapter 11: Mass-Storage Systems
• Overview of Mass Storage Structure
• HDD Scheduling
• NVM Scheduling
• Error Detection and Correction
• Storage Device Management
• Swap-Space Management
• Storage Attachment
• RAID Structure
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
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
– Drives rotate 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 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
Moving-head Disk Mechanism
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 – 9ms
common for desktop drives
– Average seek time measured or
calculated based on 1/3 of tracks
– Latency based on spindle speed
• 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
– Average latency = ½ latency
Hard Disk Performance
• Access Latency = Average access time = average
seek time + average 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 .1ms controller overhead and Transfer time =
0.031 ms
– Average Access time=5+4.17=9.17
–Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + 0.1ms
+0.031ms = 9.301ms
The First Commercial Disk Drive
1956
IBM RAMDAC
computer included
the IBM Model 350
disk storage system
5M (7 bit) characters
50 x 24” platters
Access time = < 1
second
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
• Can be more reliable than HDDs
• More expensive per MB
• Maybe have shorter life span – need
careful management
Nonvolatile Memory Devices
• 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
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 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
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
• Computers have buffering, caching via RAM, so
why RAM drives?
– Caches / buffers allocated / managed by programmer,
operating system, hardware
– RAM drives under user control
– Found in all major operating systems
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).
• Most common is SATA
• 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
• Data transferred via DMA between device and computer DRAM
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
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
• 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
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 sorting of requests
• Some of the algorithms they use described next
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
• We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a
request queue (0-199)
98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67
Head pointer 53
FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders
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 208
cylinders
• But note that if requests are uniformly dense,
largest density at other end of disk and those
wait the longest
SCAN (Cont.)
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
• Total number of cylinders?
C-SCAN (Cont.)
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
Error Detection and Correction
• 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
Storage Device Management
• Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a
disk into sectors that the disk controller can read and write
– Each sector can hold header information, plus data, plus
error correction code (ECC)
– Usually 512 bytes of data but can be selectable
• 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, each
treated as a logical disk
– 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
Storage Device Management (cont.)
• Root partition contains the OS, other partitions can
hold other Oses, other file systems, or be raw
– Mounted at boot time
– Other partitions can mount automatically or
manually
• At mount time, file system consistency checked
– Is all metadata correct?
If not, fix it, try again
If yes, add to mount table, allow access
• Boot block can point to boot volume or boot loader set
of blocks that contain enough code to know how to load
the kernel from the file system
– Or a boot management program for multi-os booting
Device Storage Management (Cont.)
• Raw disk access for apps
that want to do their own
block management, keep OS
out of the way (databases for
example)
• Boot block initializes system
– The bootstrap is stored in
ROM, firmware
– Bootstrap loader
program stored in boot Booting from
blocks of boot partition secondary storage
• Methods such as sector
in Windows
sparing used to handle bad
blocks
Swap-Space Management
• Used for moving entire processes (swapping), or pages
(paging), from DRAM to secondary storage when DRAM not
large enough for all processes
• Operating system provides swap space management
– Secondary storage slower than DRAM, so important to
optimize performance
– Usually multiple swap spaces possible – decreasing I/O load
on any given device
– Can be in raw partition or a file within a file system (for
convenience of adding)
– Data structures for swapping on Linux systems:
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
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)
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)
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, etc
Storage Area Network
• Common in large storage environments
• Multiple hosts attached to multiple
storage arrays – flexible
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
• Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve write
performance
• Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve
the use of multiple disks working cooperatively
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
• Frequently, a small number of hot-spare disks are left
unallocated, automatically replacing a failed disk and having
data rebuilt onto them
RAID Levels
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
Extensions
• RAID alone does not prevent or detect
data corruption or other errors, just disk
failures
• Solaris ZFS adds checksums of all
data and metadata
• Checksums kept with pointer to object,
to detect if object is the right one and
whether it changed
• Can detect and correct data and
metadata corruption
• ZFS also removes volumes, partitions ZFS checksums all
– Disks allocated in pools metadata and
– Filesystems with a pool share that pool, use data
and release space like malloc() and
free() memory allocate / release calls
Traditional and Pooled Storage
