11.3 Disk Scheduling
The most important hardware device used as secondary memory is the magnetic disk drive. File systems stored on these drives must be accessed in an efficient manner. It turns out that transferring data to and from secondary memory is the worst bottleneck in a general computer system.
Recall from Chapter 10 that the speed of the CPU and the speed of main memory are much faster than the speed of data transfer to and from secondary memory such as a magnetic disk. That’s why a process that must perform I/O to disk is made to wait while that data is transferred, to give another process a chance to use the CPU.
Because secondary I/O is the slowest aspect of a general computer system, the techniques for accessing data on a disk ...
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