Deck 05: Storage

Deck 05: Storage

Q1. What do we mean with we call HDDs and SSDs “block devices”?

Q2. A device can store 1000 GB, can transfer 100 MB/s, and serve one request in 10 ms.  What kinds of metrics are these, respectively?

Q3. If throughput can be expressed as X MB/s or Y Mbps, what is the relationship between X and Y?

Q4. Memory is byte-addressible.  But what is the unit of access for an HDD, SSD, etc?

Q5. What are two ways we can use memory to make access to block devices more efficient?

Q6. What are the names for these two data access patterns?

Q7. “block” and “page” have different meanings for SSD internals than we’ve seen for operating systems and interactions with block devices.  What are the differences?

Q8. How can we break a block device into smaller sections?

Q9. How can we treat multiple individual block devices like one bigger, more reliabel one?

Q10. What is the data structure in a file system that points to blocks containing file data?

Q11. On UNIX, how do we make many smaller file systems appear as one big one?