Section 17.4
Review Questions
Disk addressing
  1. How does a computer locate data on a disk drive?
answer...
by using a sector address
  1. What are the components of such an address?
answer...
surface number, track number, sector number
  1. Why is it useless to specify the byte address?
answer...
because the entire sector must be read or written as a unit; the byte address would only make sense once the sector's contents are copied into actual RAM memory
  1. What do we call the device that interprets high level disk drive commands coming from the computer?
answer...
the controller
  1. What is a device driver?
answer...
a piece of software that is logically part of the operating system, and which translates high level I/O commands to controller commands
  1. What tasks does the controller perform?
answer...
it issues microcommands to the actual hardware;
it translates high level addresses into lower level addresses