CSUMB Learning Journal

We’re in the last week of CST334 and it’s a very short week. The question prompt is a little confusing this time since it’s asking what we learned in this eighth week even though there wasn’t any reading to do. We do have the final preparation slides, but that’s just reviewing units five to seven and isn’t anything new. I had to read the prompt a few times over because it’s confusing. Persistence as it applies to Operating Systems is the concept of any data that persists for longer than the process that created it. This is most easily demonstrated by having a process write data to any form of non-volatile storage, like a hard drive. Persistence is ubiquitous in computing and I feel that it should’ve probably been covered earlier in the textbook because of that. If you want to get philosophical you could say that persistence also applies to students because the knowledge we learn in this course *hopefully* persists after we’ve finished this class. You could also use the other definition...

This week's topic was persistence. We first read chapter 36 about I/O devices since that’s a prerequisite for covering hard disk storage in chapter 37. Chapter 38 covered RAIDs which are just arrays of hard disks. I didn’t really learn anything in these chapters since it’s all relatively common knowledge about computers. Speaking of common knowledge, chapter 39 was about files and directories which is what anybody who uses a computer should already know about. That actually reminds me of this one time I was in a Programming for C class at a different school and most of the students didn’t know what the downloads folder was. Chapter 40 was the most informative chapter because it covered how file systems are implemented. I didn’t know much about inodes or how exactly data was structured in blocks before reading this chapter.