Storage Management

Question 1

what is constant angular velocity?

Answer 1

when the density of bits does not stay constant from outer to inner, the drive does not change is velocity depending on the location of the read/write head

Question 2

what is constant linear velocity?

Answer 2

the density of bits per track is uniform so the drive needs to speed up when the read/write head is nearer to the center to keep the same rate of data moving

Question 3

what is low level formatting?

Answer 3

fills the devices with special data structures for each storage location

Question 4

what is logical formatting?

Answer 4

the creation of a file system

Question 5

what are clusters?

Answer 5

a group of blocks (I/O is done via blocks, but file system I/O is done via clusters)

Question 6

what are spare sectors?

Answer 6

often storage devices have a set aside disk space they can use to spare when bad blocks occur

Question 7

how large are typical swap page slots?

Answer 7

4kb

Question 8

what is a swap map?

Answer 8

a map for pages in the swap partition

Question 9

what is a file’s magic number?

Answer 9

short sequence of characters at the start of the file header which identifies the file type

Question 10

what is a file header?

Answer 10

a portion of the file preceding the actual data that is only visible to the file system and includes metadata

Question 11

does a newly created file need a length or contents?

Answer 11

no

Question 12

what is the open file table?

Answer 12

a data structure that keeps track of all files currently in use