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Operating System Concepts, Seventh Edition
book

Operating System Concepts, Seventh Edition

by Peter Baer Galvin, Abraham Silberschatz, Greg Gagne
December 2004
Intermediate to advanced
921 pages
30h 34m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Operating System Concepts, Seventh Edition

Chapter 12. Mass-Storage Structure

The file system can be viewed logically as consisting of three parts. In Chapter 10, we saw the user and programmer interface to the file system. In Chapter 11, we described the internal data structures and algorithms used by the operating system to implement this interface. In this chapter, we discuss the lowest level of the file system: the secondary and tertiary storage structures. We first describe the physical structure of magenetic disks and magnetic tapes. We then describe disk-scheduling algorithms that schedule the order of disk I/Os to improve performance. Next, we discuss disk formatting and management of boot blocks, damaged blocks, and swap space. We then examine secondary storage structure, covering disk reliability and stable-storage implementation. We conclude with a brief description of tertiary storage devices and the problems that arise when an operating system uses tertiary storage.

Overview of Mass-Storage Structure

In this section we present a general overview of the physical structure of secondary and tertiary storage devices.

Magnetic Disks

Magnetic disks provide the bulk of secondary storage for modern computer systems. Conceptually, disks ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780471694663Purchase book