FWB's Guide to Storage
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GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page i Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM FWB’s Guide to Storage Second Edition GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page ii Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM Copyright Notice This manual is copyrighted by FWB Software, LLC (FWB) with all rights reserved. Your rights with regard to this manual are subject to the restrictions and limitations imposed by the copyright laws of the United States of Amer- ica. Under the copyright laws, this manual may not be copied, reproduced, translated, transmitted or reduced to any printed or electronic medium or to any machine-readable form, in whole or in part, without the written consent of FWB. © 1991, 1996 By FWB Software, LLC December 1996 Part No.: 07-00841-201 GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page iii Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM Trademarks Hard Disk ToolKit, RAID ToolKit, SpaceMaker ToolKit, and CD-ROM Tool- Kit are trademarks of FWB Software, LLC. FWB is a registered trademark of FWB Software, LLC. All brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Credits This guide was written by Norman Fong with help from Joan Carter, Steve Dalton, Bruce Dundas, Eric Herzog, Al Pierce, Stuart Saraquse, and Fred Swan. It was designed, edited, and composed by Joan Carter with help from Allan Levite. Illustrations were produced by Deane Morris. The original version of this manual was written in 1991 by Leslie Feldman, Norman Fong, Kevin Kachadourian, Neil Strudwick, and Paul Worthington as part of FWB’s Hard Disk ToolKit 1.x manual. Dedication This book is dedicated to my family and friends who put up with the long hours put into this effort. Kudos to those who enjoyed the original and inspired us to push the envelope once again five years later! GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page iv Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page v Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM Preface Thank you for purchasing the second edition of FWB’s Guide to Storage. We hope you will find this an informative guide to one of the most important components of your computer: your storage peripherals. Most users never think twice about their drives until they cannot install a new program or save a file. Yet behind the drive letter or icon on your screen is a vast amount of technology representing millions of hours of research and development. Storage peripherals are another way technology has enabled users to dramatically increase their productivity. This guide is not meant to document each subject exhaustively, but to serve as a bridge between non-technical documentation on storage and the techni- cal specifications that define the major standards and technologies. We will cover many of the most important storage-related technologies in detail. Once you have read this guide, if you are interested in deepening your under- standing of storage technology, there are many fine books available that focus on specific subjects, such as drive interfaces, jumper settings, and other stor- age technologies. Look in the Bibliography for additional relevant titles. Please contact us if you have suggestions for additions to this Guide. NORMAN FONG President, FWB Software, LLC Preface v GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page vi Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM vi FWB’s Guide to Storage GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page vii Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM Table of Contents List of Figures ............................................................................................. xiii List of Tables ............................................................................................... xvi Chapter 1. Introduction .............................................................................. 19 About This Guide . 19 Overview of Chapters . 19 Chapter 2. All About Drives ...................................................................... 21 Overview . 21 Storage Life . 21 Capacity and Access . 22 A Short History of Hard Drives . 25 BH (before hard drives) . 25 The first true hard drive . 26 Mechanics . 27 Anatomy of a hard drive . 27 Read/Write channel . 37 The Medium . 38 Spinning ‘round . 39 Head parking . 39 Form Factor . 40 Operations . 43 Formatting . 43 Encoding . 44 Data detection . 47 Error correction . 47 Interleaving . 48 Sector skew . 49 Data transfer rates . 50 Caching . 52 Thermal recalibration . 58 Drivers . 59 When Things Go Wrong . 59 Software errors . 60 Hardware errors . 60 Drives Don’t Have to Die Quickly! . 62 Saving data . 62 Disk duplexing and disk mirroring . 63 RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks . 64 Table of Contents vii GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page viii Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM But When You Gotta Go … . 64 Preventative measures . 66 Data recovery . 67 Defragmentation . 68 Need a New Drive? . 69 Indicators of durability and reliability . 69 Other statistics to consider . 72 Capacity . 72 Other considerations . 73 Trends in Hard Drives . 73 Smaller platters . 73 Smaller drives . 74 Faster, smaller controllers . 74 Connector size is slow to change . 75 Faster, lighter heads and actuators . 75 Green drives . 76 All digital drives . 76 Holographic memory . 77 Large volumes . 77 Chapter 3. RAID Technology .................................................................... 79 What is RAID? . 79 What to look for . 80 Specific features . 80 RAID Levels—Overview . 82 RAID Level 0 . 84 RAID Level 1 . 86 RAID Level 2 . 86 RAID Level 3 . 87 RAID Level 4 . 88 RAID Level 5 . 88 RAID 5 and Fault Tolerance . 89 Up to two disks can fail . 93 Increasing fault tolerance . 93 Other RAID Levels . 94 Hardware-Based Disk Arrays . 94 Bus-Based Hardware Disk Arrays . 95 Software-Based Disk Arrays . 95 SAF-TE . 95 RAID Advisory Board (RAB) . 96 Chapter 4. Other Types of Storage Devices .............................................. 97 Removable drives . 98 Removable cartridge drives . 99 Zip drives . 101 Bernoulli drives . 101 viii FWB’s Guide to Storage GtoS 2nd Ed. Book Page ix Friday, March 27, 1998 12:05 PM Magneto-optical drives . 102 Phase change optical drives . 104 Floptical drives . 105 CD-ROM.