13–4 DISK MEMORY SYSTEMS

• Disk memory is used to store long-term data.

• Many types of disk storage systems are available and
they use magnetic media.
– except optical disk memory that stores data
on a plastic disk
• Optical disk memory is either:
– CD-ROM (compact disk/read only memory)
which read, but never written
– WORM (write once/read mostly), read most of
the time, but can be written once by a laser
• Optical disk memory that can be read and written
many times is becoming available.
– there is still a limitation on the number of write
operations allowed
• The latest optical disk technology is called DVD
(digital-versatile disk).
– also available in high-resolution versions for
video and data storage as Blu-ray (50G) or
HD-DVD (30G)
 Floppy Disk Memory
• The floppy, or flexible disk was once the most
common and basic form of disk memory.
– the floppy is beginning to vanish and may disappear
shortly in favor of the USB pen drive
• Floppy disk magnetic recording media have been
made available in three sizes:
– 8 standard
– 51/4 mini-floppy
– 31/2 micro-floppy.
• All disks have several things in common.
• They are all organized so that data are stored in
tracks and sectors.
– a track is a concentric ring of data stored on
the surface of a disk
– a sector is a common subdivision of a track
designed to hold a reasonable amount of data
• In many systems, a sector holds either 512
or 1024 bytes of data.
– size of a sector can vary from 128 bytes to the length
of one entire track
Figure 13–18 The format of a 51/4 mini-floppy disk.
– the index hole is so
the system can find
the start of a track and
first sector (00)
– tracks are numbered
from track 00, the
outermost track,
toward the center
– sectors are often
numbered from sector
00 on the outermost
track
 The 5 1/4 Mini-floppy Disk
• The 51/4 floppy is very difficult to find and is used
only with older microcomputer systems.
• The floppy disk is rotated at 300 RPM inside its
semi-rigid plastic jacket.
– the head mechanism in a floppy drive makes physical
contact with the surface of the disk,
which causes wear and damage to the disk
• Most mini-floppy disks are double-sided.
– data are written on the top & bottom surfaces
Figure 13–19 The 51/4 mini-floppy disk.

– a set of tracks called

a cylinder consists
of one top and one
bottom track
– Cylinder 00 consists
of the outermost top and
bottom tracks
– the magnetic recording technique used to store data
on the surface of the disk is called non-return to zero
(NRZ) recording
– with NRZ recording, magnetic flux placed on the
surface of the disk never returns to zero
– arrows show the polarity of the magnetic field stored
on the surface of the disk

Figure 13–20 The non-return to zero (NRZ) recording technique.

– data are stored in the form of MFM (modified
frequency modulation) on modern floppy disks
– each bit time is 2.0 µs wide on a double-density disk
– data are recorded at the rate of 500,000 bits per
second

Figure 13–21 Modified frequency modulation (MFM) used with disk memory.
 The 3 1/2 Micro-Floppy Disk
• A much improved version of the mini-floppy disk
described earlier.
• The micro-floppy is packaged in a rigid plastic
jacket that will not bend easily.
– a much greater degree of protection to the disk
• The head door remains closed until the disk is
inserted into the drive.
– once in the drive, the mechanism slides open
the door, exposing the surface of the disk to
the read/write heads
Figure 13–22 The 31/2 micro-floppy disk.
• On the mini-floppy, a piece of tape was placed
over a notch on the side of the
jacket to prevent writing.
– this plastic tape easily became dislodged
inside disk drives, causing problems
• The micro-floppy has an integrated plastic slide
replacing the tape write-protection.
• To write-protect (prevent writing) the micro-
floppy disk, the plastic slide is moved to open the
hole through the disk jacket.
– allows light to strike a sensor that inhibits writing
 Pen Drives
• Pen drives, or flash drives use flash memory to
store data.
– a driver treats the pen drive as a floppy with
tracks and sectors, though it really does not
• The FAT system is used for the file structure.
– memory in this type of drive is serial memory
• When connected to the USB bus, the OS
recognizes it and allows data to be
transferred between it and the computer.
 Hard Disk Memory
• Hard disk memory has a much larger capacity than
the floppy disk memory.
– often called a fixed disk because it is not removable like
the floppy disk
• A hard disk is also often called a rigid disk.
– the term Winchester drive is also used, but
less commonly today
• Common, low-cost (less than $1 per gigabyte)
sizes are presently 20G bytes to 500G bytes.
– sizes approaching 1 T (tera) bytes are available
• The hard disk memory uses a flying head to store
and read data.
• A flying head, which is very small and light, does
not touch the surface of the disk.
– it flies above the surface on a film of air that is carried
with the surface of the disk as it spins
• The hard disk typically spins at 3000 to 15,000
RPM, many times faster than a floppy.
– higher rotational speed allows the head to fly
just over the top of the surface of the disk
• There is no wear on the hard disk’s surface.
• Problems can arise because of flying heads.
– if power is interrupted or the drive is jarred, the head
can crash onto the disk surface, which
can damage the disk surface or the head
• Some drive manufacturers have included a system
to automatically park the head when power is
interrupted.
– when the heads are parked, they are moved
to a safe landing zone (unused track) when
power is disconnected
• Another difference between a floppy and a hard
drive is the number of heads and disk surfaces.
– a floppy has two heads, one for the upper
surface and one for the lower surface
– the hard drive has up to eight disk surfaces (four
platters), with up to two heads per surface
• Each time a new cylinder is obtained by moving
the head assembly, 16 new tracks
are available under the heads.
• See Figure 13–23.
• Heads are moved from track to track by using
either a stepper motor or a voice coil.
– the stepper motor is slow and noisy; moving the head
assembly requires one step per cylinder
– the voice coil mechanism is quiet and quick; the heads
can be moved many cylinders with one sweeping
motion

• Stepper-motor-type head positioning mechanisms

can become misaligned
– while the voice coil mechanism corrects for
any misalignment
Figure 13–23 A hard disk drive that uses four heads per platter.
• Hard drives often store information in sectors that
are 512 bytes long.
• Data are addressed in clusters of eight or more
sectors, which contain 4096 bytes (or more) on
most hard disk drives.
• All hard drives use today RLL encoding.
 RLL Storage
• The term run-length limited (RLL) means the run
of zeros (zeros in a row) is limited.
– a common RLL encoding scheme is RLL 2,7, which
means the run of zeros is always between
two and seven
• An RLL drive often contains 27 tracks instead of
the 18 found on the MFM drive.
• Fig 13–24 is a comparison of MFM & RLL.
– besides holding more information, the RLL drive can be
written and read at a higher rate
Figure 13–24 A comparison of MFM with RLL using data 101001011.
• There are a number of disk drive interfaces in use
today.
– the oldest is the ST-506 interface, which uses either
MFM or RLL data
• Newer standards are in use today.
– which include ESDI, SCSI, and IDE
• The IDE system is becoming the standard hard
disk memory interface.
• The enhanced small disk interface (ESDI) system is
capable of transferring data at
rates approaching 10M bytes per second.
• ST-506 interface approaches 860K bytes/sec.
• The small computer system interface (SCSI) allows
up to seven different disk or other interfaces to be
connected to the computer through same
interface controller.
– SCSI is found in some PC-type computers and also in
the Apple Macintosh system
• An improved version, SCSI-II, has started to
appear in some systems.
– in the future, this interface may be replaced
with IDE in most applications
• One of the most common systems is the
integrated drive electronics (IDE) system.
– incorporates the disk controller in the drive and
attaches to the host system through a small interface
cable
• IDE drives are found in newer IBM PS-2 systems
and many clones.
– even Apple computer systems are starting
to be found with IDE drives
• The IDE interface is also capable of driving other
I/O devices besides the hard disk.
• IDE usually contains at least a 256K- to 8M-byte
cache memory for disk data.
– the cache speeds disk transfers
• Access times for an IDE drive are often less than 8
ms.
– access time for a floppy-disk is about 200 ms
• IDE is also called ATA, an acronym for
AT attachment where “AT” means the Advanced
Technology computer.
• The latest is the serial ATA interface or SATA.
– this interface transfers serial data at 150 MBps
(or 300 MBps for SATA2), faster than IDE
• Not yet released is SATA3, which transfers data at
a rate of 600 MBps.
• The transfer rate is higher because the logic 1
level is no longer 5.0 V. It is now 0.5 V.
– which allows higher data transfer rates because
it takes less time for the signal to rise to 0.5 V than to
5.0 V
 Optical Disk Memory
• Optical disk memory is commonly available
in two forms:
– CD-ROM (compact disk/read only memory)
– WORM (write once/read mostly)
• CD-ROM is the lowest cost, but suffers from lack of
speed.
– access times are typically 300 ms or longer
• As systems develop and become more visually
active, use of the CD-ROM drive
will become even more common.
Figure 13–25 The optical CD-ROM memory system.
• The WORM drive sees far more commercial
application than the CD-ROM.
– application is very specialized due to its nature
• WORM is normally used to form an audit trail of
transactions spooled onto the WORM and
retrieved only during an audit.
– one might call the WORM an archiving device
• The advantage of the optical disk is durability.
• About the only way to destroy data on an optical
disk is to break it or deeply scar it.
• The new versatile read/write CD-ROM, called a
DVD, became available in the mid 1990’s.
• New to this technology are the Blu-ray DVD from
Sony Corporation and the HD-DVD
from Toshiba Corporation.
– Blu-ray DVD capacity is 50 GB; HD-DVD, 30 GB
• The big change from older DVDs is a switch from a
red laser to a blue laser.
– a blue laser has a higher frequency, which
means it can read more information per second from
the DVD, hence a high storage density