Re: Benefits from computing physical IDE disk geometry?

["Dr. David Alan Gilbert" <gilbertd@treblig.org>]

* Chuck Ebbert (76306.1226@compuserve.com) wrote:

>   OTOH you can come up with scenarios like, say, a DBMS doing 16K page
> aligned IO to raw devices where you might see big gains from making sure
> those 16K chunks didn't cross a physical cylinder boundary.

Maybe true; but figuring out where the drive really puts your sectors
these days ain't that easy; what with remapping and multiple different
densities on the platter.

Now given these discs have processors on board isn't it about time
someone improved the disc interface standards to push some of the
intelligence drivewards?  I guess with enough intelligence the drive
could do free block allocation and could do things like copying blocks
around for you.

Dave
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