George Gambill said:
> Many years ago, we learned, on an IBM mainframe (slow by today's
> standards) that we could drastically increase thru put by separating
> certain files to different disk drives.  This reduced head contention.
>
> I am wondering if the same distribution of files across a cluster
> (separate disk drives) might also increase performance.  Granted, the
> drives back then had a 25 ms average seek time and today that number is
> less than 10.

This is called striping or RAID 0.  It is done at a block level now with
so many blocks of a file going to the first drive, then the next and so
on.  Don't need a cluster of computers to do it, just a RAID controller or
even software that drives the multiple drives.  Linux has a software RAID
driver already that does various levels of RAID implmentations, including
RAID 0.

> It's a thought.

It's a good one.

Alan



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