# ML Wiki

## Secondary Storage

This is a part of the Memory Hierarchy

Disks is the most common secondary storage

• The disk is organized into disk blocks (or pages, from the OS point of view) of 4-64 KBs each
• Buffers - entire blocks are moved to and from a continuous sections of main memory

Key technique: organize data in a way that

• when something is needed from a block
• it's likely that other information from that block will also be needed

### Main Components

Consists of two main components:

• Disk Assembly

Disk Assembly

• has one or more circular platters that rotate around a central spindle
• upper and lower surfaces are covered with magnetic materials (that store 1s and 0s)

Hierarchy

• disk is organized into tracks - concentric circles on a single platter
• tracks that are at fixed radius from the center (among all the surfaces) form one cylinder
• tracks are organized into sectors - segments that are separated by non-magnetic gaps

### Disk Controller

Disk drives are controlled by a disk controller (DC): a small processor that

• selects a needed sector
• transfers bits between sectors and the main memory
• buffers entire track in local memory of the disk controller (in hope it will be needed soon)

It communicates with the main memory via the data bus

### Accessing

Accessing (reading or writing) a block of data requires 3 steps:

1. DC positions the head assembly at the cylinder that contains the needed block
the time to do it is the seek time
2. DC waits until the first sector of the block appears under the head
the rotation latency
typically 0-10 mls, 5 mls on average (1 rotations is 10 mls)
3. DC reads/writes sectors under the head while sectors pass under it
the transfer time
quite small

the latency of disk is a sum of the three:

• seek time + rotation latency + transfer time
• usually ~10-11 mls
• but it doesn't mean that the system will get all data in 10 mls after sending a request to DC: it may be busy with another processes

Another measure:

• throughput - the number of dist accesses per second that the system can accommodate

## Techniques to Speed Up Access

### Optimizing by Cylinders

place blocks that are accessed together on the same (or adjacent) cylinder

• this way can decrease seek time and possibly the rotation latency
• if we read blocks consequently, then we may neglect all seek times (except for first)

### Striping

divide data among several smaller disks (rather than one large one)

• in result, you'll have more independent head assemblies
• increases the number of block accesses per unit of time

• As long as DC, bus, memory can handle $n$ times the data-transfer rate,
• then $n$ disks will have approximately the performance of 1 disk operating $n$ times faster
• but if the system is overloaded, when requests are delayed (or even cancelled)

Striping - this is a technique to speed up access to large DB objects

• (a large DB object is one that spans several disk blocks)

Idea:

• Suppose we have 4 disks and want to access a relation faster
• then we can "stripe" this relation by dividing it among the 4 disks:
• 1 disk receives blocks 1, 5, 9, ...
• 2 disk received blocks 2, 6, 10, ...

### Mirroring

"Mirror" a disk

• have 2 or more copies of the same information on different disks
• like the previous technique - allows to access several blocks at the same time
• for $n$ disks, rate at which we can read goes up by a factor of $n$
• the speedup can be even greater if DC chooses the disk with its head being closest to the needed block
• but writing doesn't speed up at all: we need to write data to all $n$ disks
• reliability as a bonus we have a backup if one of the disks fails

### Scheduling

it's possible to use a disk-scheduling algorithm

• to select the order in which several blocks are read/written
• cannot use this approach if we need to have some certain sequence
• but if requests come from independent processes, they can benefit from it (on average)

The Elevator Algorithm: to schedule large numbers of block requests

Idea:

• disk heads go from innermost to outermost cylinder, and then back again
• just as an elevator from bottom to top and back
• as heads pass a cylinder, they stop if there's a request for block on that cylinder
• they proceed in the same direction until the next required cylinder is met