CST 334 Week 7

 

WELCOME TO WEEK 7

Learning Journal

    This week we learned about the main form of persistent data storage in computer systems, which are hard disk drives. The drives consist of sectors that can be read or written. These sectors are numbered 0 to n-1 on a disk with n sectors. They can be viewed as an array of sectors. In order to read or write from the sectors, we use the disk head and arm. The surface of the disk rotates counterclockwise. To understand how a request would be processed, the disk just has to wait for the desired sector to rotate under the disk head. This is what is called rotational delay. However, there are multiple tracks on the disk, and it will seek along the rotations. This will be the seek time. Finally, once it is in the desired sector, the final phase of I/O will be the transfer, where data will either be read or written to the surface. Therefore, the I/O time would be represented by three major components: seek time, rotational delay, and transfer time. It is also important to know that there are two workloads: one is random workload, which reads from random locations on the disk, and the other is sequential workload, which reads a large number of sectors consecutively from the disk.

    There are also more complex versions of disks called RAIDs. RAID is a technique to use multiple disks to build faster, bigger, and more reliable disk systems. Externally, a RAID looks like a disk. However, internally the RAID has multiple disks, memory (both volatile and non-volatile), and processors. The advantages of using a RAID are performance, capacity, and reliability. RAIDs can also tolerate the loss of a disk and keep operating without a problem.

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