Question
Consider a disk pack with a seek time of milliseconds and rotational speed of rotations per minute (RPM). It has sectors per track and each sector can store bytes of data. Consider a file stored in the disk. The file contains sectors. Assume that every sector access necessitates a seek, and the average rotational latency for accessing each sector is half of the time for one complete rotation. The total time (in milliseconds) needed to read the entire file is _____.
Official answer and solution
- Official answer
- 14020
- From
- Official GATE 2015 answer key
Solution
Sum seek time, average rotational latency, and transfer time for each sector access, then scale across all 2000 sectors.
-
Time for one complete rotation:
-
Average rotational latency:
-
Transfer time per sector:
Since each track has 600 sectors, the time to pass over one sector is: -
Total access time per sector:
Given seek time : -
Total time for 2000 sectors:
The total time needed is milliseconds.
14020
Omitting the sector transfer time (0.01 ms), which would give 14000 ms instead of 14020 ms.
The answer is the one in the official GATE answer key. The solution is this site's own explanation.
Source
- Paper
- GATE 2015 Computer Science and Information Technology (CS) Session 1
- Question
- 58 of 65, printed as CS Q.48
- Section
- Computer Science and Information Technology
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