Performance Support

Storage: Disk Storage Basics

Transcript
There are many aspects to consider when looking at computer systems and performance. One of the areas that is getting more and more attention these days when we talk about overall system performance is storage. This is because as individual systems get bigger and workload consolidation gains ground, storage is starting to become an area that we look to when we find performance bottlenecks. In order to gain a basic understanding of storage for these purposes lets first take a look at the underlying components of a traditional mechanical hard disk. A hard disk is made up of electronics and moving parts. There are drive electronics, spinning platters, and a number of read/write heads which are swung across the disk on an arm. In the illustration here, we see the essential components of a disk drive. e!re focused mainly on the mechanical aspects of the drive here as this is what limits the rate at which data can be read from the disk and written to the disk. The disk platter " the platter is the actual component where the information is recorded inside a drive housing. Its basically a hard material coated with a magnetic surface. The platter stores our data and is spun at an incredible speed by the central spindle. The platters are divided into thousands of circles called tracks and each track is in then further subdivided into sectors. These divisions make locating the data on the platter possible. The drive head " the drive head reads and writes information to and from the magnetic platter as it passes beneath the heads. There are usually two heads per platter. The actuator arm " this is the drive component that holds the heads and ensures that the heads are positioned over the correct disk track when reads and writes occur. #o as a drive fills with data the actuator arm needs to move back and forth over the spinning platters more. $efine the data as its distributed across available disk sectors. ith this high level understanding of how the drive works it stands to reason that two of the important factors in drive performance are how fast the platter spins and how fast the actuator arm moves the head to find the data. These are known as the rotational speed given in %&' and the seek time which translate into average latency and average seek times in drive specifications. These are combined to give another important metric, response time, measured in milliseconds. Adding the average latency and average seek time give us the response time. (ow to understand the entire process. The first step, an application makes a re)uest for data, the re)uest. The second step, the disk actuator moves the head to the appropriate track on the platter, this is the seek. The third step, the head needs to wait for the rotation of the platter to place the correct data under the head, the rotation or latency. And finally the fourth step, the data is either read or written. This is disk storage basics, thank you for watching.

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