IT- Operating Disk

Let's learn something about computer hardware. The operating system is responsible for several other aspects of disk management, too. A new magnetic disk is a blank slate: It is just platters of a magnetic recording material. Before a disk can store data, it must be divided into sectors that the disk controller can read and write. This process is called low-level formatting (or physical formatting).Low-level formatting fills the disk with a special data structure for each sector. The data structure for a sector typically consists of a header, a data area (usually 512 bytes in size), and a trailer. The header and trailer contain information used by the disk controller, such as a sector number and an error-correcting code (ECC).When the controller writes a sector of data during normal I/O, the FCC is updated with a value calculated from all the bytes in the data area. When the sector is read, the ECC is recalculated and is compared with the stored value. Storing and calculating numbers are different. The mismatch indicates that the data area of the sector has become corrupted and that the disk sector may be damaged.

At the same time, we should know that the ECC is an error-correcting code because it contains enough information that, if only a few bits of data have been corrupted, the controller can identify which bits have changed and can calculate what their correct values should be. The controller automatically does the ECC processing whenever a sector is read or written. Most hard disks are low-level formatted at the factory as a part of the manufacturing process. This formatting enables the manufacturer to test the disk and to initialize the mapping from logical block numbers to defect-free sectors on the disk. For many hard disks, when the disk controller is instructed to low-level format the disk, it can also be told how many bytes of data space to leave between the header and trailer of sections.

But some operating systems give special programs the ability to use a disk partition as a large sequential array of logical blocks, without any file-system data structures. We can make certain applications more efficient by implementing their own special purpose storage services on a raw partition, but most applications perform find it better when they utilize the regular file-system operations.