Question

A disk has 800 tracks per surface, 180 sectors per track, and 512 bytes per sector. The disk rotates at 5000 rpm (rotations per minute). The average seek time between random tracks is 10 ms. The seek time between adjacent tracks is 2 ms.

Determine the number of seek operation to read the entire disk.

Answer 1

The number of seek operations needed to read the entire disk is 799 for a single-sided disk, which is based on the need to seek to each of the 800 tracks minus the first starting track.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine the number of seek operations to read the entire disk, we leverage the information about the disk's structure and mechanics. Since the disk has 800 tracks per surface and we know that the head needs to move to each track to read it, we will have 799 seek operations between adjacent tracks since we don't need to seek to the first track where the read head starts. This assumes a single-surface disk; if the disk is double-sided, this number would be doubled. However, the question does not specify multiple surfaces or heads operating simultaneously, so we are assuming a single-sided read process for this calculation.

The time taken for these operations, or the total seek time, isn’t required for this question; however, it's important to note that the provided seek times are not directly useful in calculating the number of seeks but would be applied to find the total time taken for all seek operations.