CPSC 2800 Review Questions and Answers
1. A hard disk drive has 16 platters, 8192 cylinders, and 256 4KB sectors per track. The storage
capacity of this disk drive is at most: 128 GB.
2. What are the two components of positioning time?: seek time + rotational latency
3. The surface of a magnetic disk platter is divided into .: tracks
4. Which of the following statements regarding solid state disks (SSDs) is false?: They
generally consume more power than traditional hard disks.
5. An advantage of SSDs over HDDs is: (option 2) SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.
(option 3) SSDs are faster than HDDs.
6. A Flash Translation Layer: tracks which physical block contains only invalid pages.
7. DRAMs are now commonly used for mass data storage, because: programs can share data easily
when using RAMs.
8. Compared to USB, NVMe provides: both higher throughput and lower latency.
9. Number of sectors per track increases as we move from inner zone to outer zone, because:
angular velocity of disk rotation can remain constant.
10.An I/O system call does not include: CPU speed.
11.Which of the following disk head scheduling algorithms does not take into account the current
position of the disk head?: FCFS
12.Disk scheduling algorithms in operating systems consider only seek dis- tances, because:
modern disks do not disclose the physical location of logical blocks.
13.The SCAN scheduling algorithm .: services the request next to the cur- rent
head position in the direction of the head movement
14.Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22, 3,
11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests are
serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?: 100 -
116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
15.Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 210, 67, 11,
99, 87, 90, 19, 150. Using the C-SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests are
serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?: 90 -
99 - 150
- 210 - 11 - 19 - 67 - 87
16.To further optimize I/O performance, some SSD schedulers: merge adjacent write requests but
not adjacent read requests.
17.Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the disk scheduling
policy.: FCFS
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, CPSC 2800 Review Questions and Answers
18.If a few bits in an HDD sector or NVM page are corrupted, the controller can recover the
correct values using ECC only if: number of bits corrupted is low irrespective of where the
corruption occurs in the sector/page.
19.Which of the following statement about device formatting is FALSE?: Not every partition
contains a copy of the operating systems.
20.A full bootstrap program: may be infected by viruses.
21.Which of the following is TRUE about managing defective blocks?: All of the options.
22.Difference between sector sparing and sector slipping is: sector sparing results in copying of
a single sector while sector slipping may result in copying of multiple sectors.
23.Which of the following is FALSE about swap space use?: Swap space may be used to store the
file system.
24.In a swap map in Linux: counter value 5 indicates that the page slot is occupied and the page
is shared by five processes.
25.Which of the following is TRUE about NAS and Cloud storage?: In an event of temporary
network disconnection, an application using NAS will typically hang while an application using
cloud storage will typically pause.
26.Which of the following is FALSE about Storage Area Networks?: Allocation of storage to hosts
is static.
27.RAID level is the most common parity RAID system.: 5
28.A track is the smallest unit of data transfer in a hard disk drive.: F
29.Disk controllers do not usually have a built-in cache.: F
30.SCAN disk head scheduling offers no practical benefit over FCFS disk head scheduling.: F
31.In general, SCAN disk head scheduling will involve less movement of the disk heads than C-
SCAN disk head scheduling.: T
32.Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the FCFS disk scheduling algo- rithm.: T
33.Windows allows a hard disk to be divided into one or more partitions: T
34.In Solaris, swap space is only used as a backing store for pages of anonymous
memory.: T
35.Data striping provides reliability for RAID systems.: F
36.In asynchronous replication, each block is written locally and remotely before the write is
considered complete.: F
37.RAID level 0 provides no redundancy.: T
38.A current trend in I/O device technology and I/O subsystem is: there is an increasingly broad
variety of I/O devices.
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1. A hard disk drive has 16 platters, 8192 cylinders, and 256 4KB sectors per track. The storage
capacity of this disk drive is at most: 128 GB.
2. What are the two components of positioning time?: seek time + rotational latency
3. The surface of a magnetic disk platter is divided into .: tracks
4. Which of the following statements regarding solid state disks (SSDs) is false?: They
generally consume more power than traditional hard disks.
5. An advantage of SSDs over HDDs is: (option 2) SSDs are more reliable than HDDs.
(option 3) SSDs are faster than HDDs.
6. A Flash Translation Layer: tracks which physical block contains only invalid pages.
7. DRAMs are now commonly used for mass data storage, because: programs can share data easily
when using RAMs.
8. Compared to USB, NVMe provides: both higher throughput and lower latency.
9. Number of sectors per track increases as we move from inner zone to outer zone, because:
angular velocity of disk rotation can remain constant.
10.An I/O system call does not include: CPU speed.
11.Which of the following disk head scheduling algorithms does not take into account the current
position of the disk head?: FCFS
12.Disk scheduling algorithms in operating systems consider only seek dis- tances, because:
modern disks do not disclose the physical location of logical blocks.
13.The SCAN scheduling algorithm .: services the request next to the cur- rent
head position in the direction of the head movement
14.Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 116, 22, 3,
11, 75, 185, 100, 87. Using the SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests are
serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?: 100 -
116 - 185 - 87 - 75 - 22 - 11 - 3
15.Consider a disk queue holding requests to the following cylinders in the listed order: 210, 67, 11,
99, 87, 90, 19, 150. Using the C-SCAN scheduling algorithm, what is the order that the requests are
serviced, assuming the disk head is at cylinder 88 and moving upward through the cylinders?: 90 -
99 - 150
- 210 - 11 - 19 - 67 - 87
16.To further optimize I/O performance, some SSD schedulers: merge adjacent write requests but
not adjacent read requests.
17.Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the disk scheduling
policy.: FCFS
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, CPSC 2800 Review Questions and Answers
18.If a few bits in an HDD sector or NVM page are corrupted, the controller can recover the
correct values using ECC only if: number of bits corrupted is low irrespective of where the
corruption occurs in the sector/page.
19.Which of the following statement about device formatting is FALSE?: Not every partition
contains a copy of the operating systems.
20.A full bootstrap program: may be infected by viruses.
21.Which of the following is TRUE about managing defective blocks?: All of the options.
22.Difference between sector sparing and sector slipping is: sector sparing results in copying of
a single sector while sector slipping may result in copying of multiple sectors.
23.Which of the following is FALSE about swap space use?: Swap space may be used to store the
file system.
24.In a swap map in Linux: counter value 5 indicates that the page slot is occupied and the page
is shared by five processes.
25.Which of the following is TRUE about NAS and Cloud storage?: In an event of temporary
network disconnection, an application using NAS will typically hang while an application using
cloud storage will typically pause.
26.Which of the following is FALSE about Storage Area Networks?: Allocation of storage to hosts
is static.
27.RAID level is the most common parity RAID system.: 5
28.A track is the smallest unit of data transfer in a hard disk drive.: F
29.Disk controllers do not usually have a built-in cache.: F
30.SCAN disk head scheduling offers no practical benefit over FCFS disk head scheduling.: F
31.In general, SCAN disk head scheduling will involve less movement of the disk heads than C-
SCAN disk head scheduling.: T
32.Solid state disks (SSDs) commonly use the FCFS disk scheduling algo- rithm.: T
33.Windows allows a hard disk to be divided into one or more partitions: T
34.In Solaris, swap space is only used as a backing store for pages of anonymous
memory.: T
35.Data striping provides reliability for RAID systems.: F
36.In asynchronous replication, each block is written locally and remotely before the write is
considered complete.: F
37.RAID level 0 provides no redundancy.: T
38.A current trend in I/O device technology and I/O subsystem is: there is an increasingly broad
variety of I/O devices.
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