Friday, January 25, 2008

More on ZCAV

Disk zoning gets you a nice boost in both transfer rate and capacity, but it doesn't get enough attention as a factor in things like file system design. Russell Coker has written some nice utilities and even blogged about it. To be immodest for a second, I wrote a USENIX paper about the topic more than a decade ago.

What prompted the post was spotting a beautiful ZCAV (disk zoning) effect.

You can see the nice little arc in it, and looks like 16 zones for the Seagate drive.

I've been thinking about this recently, since I lectured about disks last week...and my own hard drive crashed. Yow. I'm think I'm cool, though. Not sure if it was hardware or software. My best guess is unwritten cache writes, but the logical volume manager info got trashed, and it shouldn't have been touched...

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