Minimizing the Response Time of a Striped Disk Array

Disk system performance is a bottleneck of improving computer system performance. In order to minimize the disk response time for every file access request and improve the disk system I/O performance, in this paper, a new method to choose the near-optimal striping unit was described. A calculation formula of the near-optimal striping unit was designed through analyzing the relationship between the request size, request arrival rate and the optimal striping unit when the disk response time is minimal. By the formula, the near-optimal striping unit in the case of different request sizes and different request arrival rates can be obtained quickly and easily. Theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that the method can better satisfy the time and space requirement than the traditional method.