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Hale Landis wrote:
I think if you really intend that a disk drive separate "read ahead"
from a more robust "read caching" algorithm then you need to have a
serious conversation with some of the people that design and implement
these algorithms in disk drives.
Going in the wrong direction. Talk to the people who write OS
application software, because its they who generate the data access
patterns.
"read ahead" is a hint. It allows the OS to hint to the device that
reading ahead is likely to be an overall win (or, if disabled, an
overall loss). If a data access pattern is largely random, involving
lots of seeks, one would be smart to disable read-ahead, BUT NOT ALL
READ CACHING.
Users are far more likely to want to disable read-ahead, than to disable
read caching.
Jeff
