What Is File Organization?

What is File organization in system?

• Answer:

  How really it is stored in the disk or secondary storage devices. Disks contains tracks, surfaces, sectors. A sector typically 512 bytes. A group of sectors is called as block or cluster(in Windows). When we save a file, a group of empty blocks are taken from the disk and in those blocks the file content is stored. These data blocks numbers can be called as the meta information of the file. Shall I assume you have programming exposure? If so, assume you have opened a file in C language by calling fopen() function and tried to do operations using fread(), fwrite() etc. we will be doing every thing with respect to the file. We may say change 100th byte, or read 100th bytes of the file. This is first converted to the block number by OS. Further, these block numbers are converted to tracks, surfaces, sectors by the device driver. And then actual operation of reading or writing is done. Do remember even if we access on byte of a file, whole block having that byte is transferred from disk to memory. Thus, disk operations are called block operations. Read books on OS such as Dietel, etc.