Secondary

Storage
Stucture
Today's Discussion

• Disk Stucture
• Disk Attachment
• Disk Scheduling Algorithms
(FCFS , SSTF , SACN , LOOK)
• Disk Managemant
(Formating , booting , bad sectoor)
• Swap-space management
Disk Stucture
• Secondary storage devices are those devices whose memory is non volatile,
meaning, the stored data will be intact even if the system is turned off. Here are a
few things worth noting about secondary storage.

• Secondary storage is also called auxiliary storage.

• Secondary storage is less expensive when compared to primary memory like
RAMs.
• The speed of the secondary storage is also lesser than that of primary storage.
• Hence, the data which is less frequently accessed is kept in the secondary storage.
• A few examples are magnetic disks, magnetic tapes, removable thumb drives etc.
• A magnetic disk contains several platters. Each platter is divided into circular shaped tracks.
The length of the tracks near the centre is less than the length of the tracks farther from the
centre. Each track is further divided into sectors, as shown in the figure.

• Tracks of the same distance from centre form a cylinder. A read-write head is used to read
data from a sector of the magnetic disk.

• The speed of the disk is measured as two parts:

1.Transfer rate: This is the rate at which the data moves from disk to the computer.
2.Random access time: It is the sum of the seek time and rotational latency.

• Seek time is the time taken by the arm to move to the required track. Rotational latency is
defined as the time taken by the arm to reach the required sector in the track.

• Even though the disk is arranged as sectors and tracks physically, the data is logically
arranged and addressed as an array of blocks of fixed size. The size of a block can be 512 or
1024 bytes. Each logical block is mapped with a sector on the disk, sequentially. In this way,
each sector in the disk will have a logical address.
Track
Track mean a path in secondary storage, storage contains traks in circles and

in every track there is sectors means tracks are dividing in different chunks of

sectors
Sector
• Each track is divided into a number of clusters that represent the smallest unit of storage
that is addressable (can be written to or read). Typically, a cluster is 256 or 512 bytes in
length.

• Sector 0 of the diskette or disk contains a special file, the file allocation table (FAT). The FAT
tells where the directory to the files on the medium is located and information about how
clusters are used. You can't look at sector 0 directly.

• On hard disks, the first sector is called variously the master boot record, the partitionsector,
or the partition table. This record or table tells how and whether the disk has been
divided into logical partitions (for example, you can divide your hard drive into two
logical partitions or drives so that you can load different operating systems on to the disk
and switch back of
Platter
• A hard disk consists of one or more
circular disks called platters which are
mounted on a
common spindle. Each surface of a platter
is coated with a magnetic material. Both
surfaces of each disk are capable of storing
data except the top and bottom disk where
only the inner surface is used.

Spindle : Spindle is the axis on which the hard disk spins.

Read write Head
When data read from magnetic media , the read/write head is used to convert the different

magnetic poles into binary numbers that the CPU can process. Conversely, when

writing data to magnetic media, the read/write head converts the binary signals from the

CPU into magnetic charges.