Objectives
- Learn about the need for non-volatile memory that can store data
long after the electricity is turned off.
- Learn how disk drives work and distinguish between floppies and
hard disks.
- Learn how magnetization is used to encode binary data.
- Learn how data is organized on the surface of disk platters into
tracks, sectors and cylinders.
- Learn how to calculate the delay of reading and writing a disk drive
by adding up the rotational and seek delays.
- Learn how disk sectors are addressed.
- Learn how files are maintained by the operating system on disks.
- Learn about contiguous allocation of sectors versus linked-list
allocation and the trade-offs involved.
- Briefly discuss CD-ROMs (optical disks).
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Prerequisites
This chapter is self-contained.
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