Aslinac.15
net.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!houxi!npois!harpo!utah-cs!slinac!mcalpine
Tue Feb 16 14:35:01 1982
Decreasing Disk Seek Times
   I have been giving some thoughts too minimizing the average seek times
on our 80 mbyte drives. I have to run with a single file system mounted
on each drive and I am using version 7 UNIX.
As the disks have slowly filled over a period of time one finds that the 
currently used file blocks have tended to become clustered  as far away from
the inodes as possible.  This is caused by physicists wanting to leave data
on the disk for as long as possible ie until old age, death or no disk space
occurs.
  What I would like to do is produce a disk seek minimizer which would move 
file blocks of little used files towards higher block numbers based on some
function of last access date, file size, current blockno distribution etc.
  Has anyone any suggestions or even better some code which they would be willing
to share which does this job. 
                             John McAlpine
                             Saskatchewan Linear Accelerator Lab.