TABLE OF CONTENTS I love bass guitar, because it has so little to do, yet it's so important.
Brian Eno
Disk technology has advanced tremendously in the past few years. Providing virtually unlimited on-line storage at extremely low cost, it enables highly complex software to be created without worry about size limitation, as well as frees users from having to be conscientious about what and how much data to retain. While disk storage may not be the central engine of a computer, its dynamic growth and development certainly played a pivotal role in fostering the tremendous advancement of computer systems from their early days to where they are today. Imagine what the personal computer would be like if its secondary storage had a capacity of only tens of megabytes instead of the tens of gigabytes that we now take for granted.
From its original inception as a double-freezer-size storage device for accounting application, the impact of disk-based storage has now gone beyond computer systems. It is moving into our everyday lives as pervasive embedded devices in consumer products such as digital video recorders, cameras, music players, automotive navigation systems, cell phones, etc. While the basic principles of...
