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Tertiary Device Management in Operating System

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As we know about tertiary devices, let us now dive deeper into OS support which is required to manage tertiary devices.

The operating system provides support to tertiary storage devices as removable media. It involves the transfer of data between different systems. In order to manage the tertiary devices, the OS must have support for the device. The OS’s device drivers act as an interface between OS and the tertiary device and establish communication between them.
The device driver translates the commands which are sent by the OS into a form that the device can easily understand. Moreover,  the OS also requires some utilities to manage tertiary devices.

It involves several components such as:

1. API: The OS’s API provides some set of standardized functions in order to interact with the tertiary devices. This can be clearly explained by an example. Some application uses the OS’s API in order to send a command to a tertiary device. The command is to read data from the disk drive. The API translates into an understandable form and sends it to the device with the help of the device driver.

2. Hierarchical Storage Management: HSM is a system used to optimize the use of storage resources in a computer system. In this context, it is used to manage tertiary devices such as tape drives. The data which is not frequently accessed can be moved to tertiary storage devices while the most frequent data is kept on solid state drives(SSD) or HDD(Hard disk drives).

Advantages: 

  1. Optimizes the use of storage resources by reducing the amount of expensive, high-performance storage.
  2. Improves the performance of a system by maintaining the most frequently accessed data on faster storage devices

3. Device Derives: These are the programs that allow the OS to communicate with tertiary devices.


Last Updated : 04 May, 2023
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