A Space-efficient On-disk Prefetching Algorithm

Abstract

With the increased computational capability and memory space of modern hard disk drives, it became possible to employ smarter on-disk prefetching algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel on-disk prefetching algorithm which estimates whether the blocks are worth prefetching based on history, and decides to do read-ahead or not for each read request. Our work does not require modifying the standard I/O interface such as SCSI interface. Through trace-driven simulations, we show that our algorithm exhibits superior performance in terms of prefetch efficiency than the existing on-disk prefetching algorithm under mixed-media workload.