Journal Entry Week 7- CST334

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This week we focused on persistence and I/O in CST 334. The group project lined up well with the material, we looked at how physical interference (specifically sound in water) could disrupt hard drive performance and trigger OS-level failures. That made concepts like block devices, I/O scheduling, and file system reliability much more real. It was helpful to see how something as low-level as head misalignment could work its way up the stack to affect file systems like ext4 and applications like RocksDB. I could actually see the OS logs showing buffer I/O errors and how the system switched the filesystem to read-only when it couldn’t guarantee integrity anymore.

On the content side, I got a better understanding of how the OS interfaces with devices, especially the difference between block and character devices. We also covered the performance limitations of hard drives: seek time, rotational delay, and transfer rate, and how I/O schedulers like elevator (SCAN), deadline, and CFQ try to minimize wait time by reordering requests. We also discussed RAID levels and how striping, mirroring, and parity offer different tradeoffs between speed, storage efficiency, and fault tolerance. For file systems, learning how inodes, directories, hard links, and mounts work gave me a clearer view of how storage is actually structured and managed.

It was a nice change of pace not having a programming assignment this week. I used that time to finish the group project and review the on-disk structures and I/O concepts more carefully. I feel more prepared heading into the final week and the exam.

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