Lecture Operating system concepts - Chapter 14: Mass-storage systems

In this chapter, we begin a discussion of file systems at the lowest level: the structure of secondary storage. We first describe the physical structure of hard disks and magnetic tapes. We then describe disk-scheduling algorithms, which schedule the order of disk I/Os to maximize performance. Next, we discuss disk formatting and management of boot blocks, damaged blocks, and swap space. We conclude with an examination of the structure of RAID systems.