Question

Consider a disk pack with a seek time of 44 milliseconds and rotational speed of 1000010000 rotations per minute (RPM). It has 600600 sectors per track and each sector can store 512512 bytes of data. Consider a file stored in the disk. The file contains 20002000 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.

  1. Time for one complete rotation:

    Trot=60×1000 ms10000 RPM=6 ms.T_{\text{rot}} = \frac{60 \times 1000\text{ ms}}{10000\text{ RPM}} = 6\text{ ms}.
  2. Average rotational latency:

    Tlatency=Trot2=6 ms2=3 ms.T_{\text{latency}} = \frac{T_{\text{rot}}}{2} = \frac{6\text{ ms}}{2} = 3\text{ ms}.
  3. Transfer time per sector:
    Since each track has 600 sectors, the time to pass over one sector is:

    Ttransfer=Trot600=6 ms600=0.01 ms.T_{\text{transfer}} = \frac{T_{\text{rot}}}{600} = \frac{6\text{ ms}}{600} = 0.01\text{ ms}.
  4. Total access time per sector:
    Given seek time Tseek=4 msT_{\text{seek}} = 4\text{ ms}:

    Tsector=Tseek+Tlatency+Ttransfer=4+3+0.01=7.01 ms.T_{\text{sector}} = T_{\text{seek}} + T_{\text{latency}} + T_{\text{transfer}} = 4 + 3 + 0.01 = 7.01\text{ ms}.
  5. Total time for 2000 sectors:

    Ttotal=2000×7.01 ms=14020 ms.T_{\text{total}} = 2000 \times 7.01\text{ ms} = 14020\text{ ms}.

The total time needed is 1402014020 milliseconds.

Final answer

14020

Common trap

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

Report an error in this question

GATE questions are the work of the organising institutes. This site is independent and is not affiliated with them.