[H-GEN] partition advice

[Bruce Campbell]

On Mon, 22 Feb 1999 davidj at amh.com.au wrote:

> Well, personally I'd follow the idea behind the OS/2 HPFS file system.
> 
> The primary FAT, or primary superblock is in the center of the drive, and
> using some form of tree, get to anywhere in the disk in minimum _average_
> time. The theory behind this is the disk heads are on average, located
> in the center of the platters. 

Note that this is the logical centre of the disk, or halfway between the
centre and the outside of the platter.

> Of course it all depends on what function the machine serves. If it
> where say a web server (on a single disk), and the html was in /home,
> I'd put /home in the middle. Obviously this sort of layout would be
> most beneficial given a SCSI device.

The Netapp Filer uses a filesystem by the name of 'WAFL', which has some
fairly nifty tricks in it, due to how tightly integrated the controllers
and the drives are - it can be summed up by it will write what is required
whereever the heads are, which makes for higher throughput.
www.netapp.com

Another Humbug member is writing a filesystem which incorporates some of
the features of WAFL, that being filesystem-level snapshots.

--==--
Bruce.


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