Intelligent Methods for File System Optimization

The speed of I/O components is a major limitation of the speed of all other major components in today's computer systems. Motivated by this, we investigated several algorithms for efficient and intelligent organization of files on a hard disk. Total access time may be decreased if files with temporal locality also have spatial locality. Three intelligent methods based on file type, frequency, and transition probabilities information showed up to 60% savings of total I/O time over the naive placement of files. More computationally intensive hill climbing and genetic algorithms approaches did not outperform statistical methods. The experiments were run on a real and simulated hard drive in single and multiple user environments. Introduction The performance of computer systems has rapidly improved during the last 40 years. However, the speed of I/O components still lags behind the speed of all other major components in most computer systems. Since most of the I/O deals with transferring ..