Chapter 5

Storing Files

FIGURE 5.0.F01: A simple magnetic tape drive. Photographed by Dr. Richard Smith at the Computer History Museum, California A typical hard drive.

FIGURE 5.0.F02: A typical hard drive.

Courtesy of Dr. Richard Smith

FIGURE 5.0.F03: Hard drive mechanism.

EQUATION 5.0.Eq01

FIGURE 5.0.F04: Hardware block diagram of a hard drive controller.

FIGURE 5.0.F05: Low level format of a hard drive sector.

FIGURE 5.0.F06: Sectors and clusters on a hard drive.

FIGURE 5.0.F07: Detecting an error using odd parity on a nine-track tape.

FIGURE 5.0.F08: Calculating a simple checksum.

FIGURE 5.0.F09: Example of MS-DOS drive partitioning.

FIGURE 5.0.F10: A cash register that handles four decimal digits.

Courtesy of Dr. Richard Smith

TABLE 5.0.T01: Abbreviations for large numbers

TABLE 5.0.T02: Classic storage sizes

FIGURE 5.0.F11: Layout of a FAT-formatted volume.

TABLE 5.0.T03: Contents of the FAT 32 boot block

TABLE 5.0.T04: Microsoft’s FAT file system formats

FIGURE 5.0.F12: Clusters containing parts of files.

FIGURE 5.0.F13: The FAT points to the clusters in a file.

FIGURE 5.0.F14: Classic Unix volume format.

FIGURE 5.0.F15: Apple’s HFS Plus Volume Format.

FIGURE 5.0.F16: NTFS and the Master File Table.

FIGURE 5.0.F17: “Hourglass” structure of the I/O and file system.

FIGURE 5.0.F18: Procedure calls between operating system layer.

TABLE 5.0.T05: Partition table for the drive in Figure 5.9

TABLE 5.0.T06: Part of a file allocation table