New Storage System

New Storage System

(storage)(NSS) A major Multics implementation projectduring the 1970s. The initial Multics file system designhad evolved from the one-huge-disk world of CTSS. Whenmultiple disk units were used they were just assignedincreasing ranges of disk addresses, so a segment could havepages scattered over all disks on the system. This providedgood I/O parallelism but made crash recovery expensive.NSS redesigned the lower levels of the file system,introducing the concepts of logical volume and physical volume and a mapping from a Multics directory branch to aVTOC entry for each file. The new system had much betterrecovery performance in exchange for a small space andperformance cost.