great discussion on external sorting methods can be found in salzberg' book the presentation in this is similar in spirit to salzberg' for details on disk drive modeling and measurementsee the article by ruemmler and wilkes"an introduction to disk drive modeling[rw see andrew tanenbaum' structured computer organization [tan for an introduction to computer hardware and organization an excellentdetailed description of memory and hard disk drives can be found online at "the pc guide,by charles kozierok [koz (www pcguide comthe pc guide also gives detailed descriptions of the microsoft windows and unix (linuxfile systems see "outperforming lru with an adaptive replacement cache algorithmby megiddo and modha for an example of more sophisticated algorithm than lru for managing buffer pools the snowplow argument comes from donald knuth' sorting and searching [knu ]which also contains wide variety of external sorting algorithms exercises computer memory and storage prices change rapidly find out what the current prices are for the media listed in figure does your information change any of the basic conclusions regarding disk processing assume disk drive from the late is configured as follows the total storage is approximately mb divided among surfaces each surface has tracksthere are sectors/track bytes/sectorand sectors/cluster the disk turns at rpm the track-to-track seek time is msand the average seek time is ms now assume that there is kb file on the disk on averagehow long does it take to read all of the data in the fileassume that the first track of the file is randomly placed on the diskthat the entire file lies on adjacent tracksand that the file completely fills each track on which it is found seek must be performed each time the / head moves to new track show your calculations using the specifications for the disk drive given in exercise calculate the expected time to read one entire trackone sectorand one byte show your calculations using the disk drive specifications given in exercise calculate the time required to read mb file assuming (athe file is stored on series of contiguous tracksas few tracks as possible (bthe file is spread randomly across the disk in kb clusters