Split inodes/data

[carroll at m.cs.uiuc.edu]

Disk file structure question:

On a MS-DOS machine, one way to make it go a lot faster is to have 2 drives,
and use the SpeedStor driver to create a "spanned" parition, one spans more
than 1 drive. By a bit of fiddling and use of a Disk Sort (ala Norton), you
can get all the directories on the first drive, and the files on the second,
and then doing disk I/O rolls because of better locality on the two drives
(e.g., as long as you are on the "spanned" drive, one head stays in the
directory structure, and the other in the files). Personal experiments
showed a dramatic increase in throughput on disk intensive programs.

Has anyone done something similar under UNIX, e.g., use two drives, one for
inodes and the other for the data blocks? Would it even be feasible? I would
think it would work even better than under MSDOS, because (at least on the
SysV filesystems I worked with), the # of inodes is fixed, and so you wouldn't
have to do migration as you do under MS-DOS (i.e. DiskSort), and everything
could be pre-calculated.


Alan M. Carroll                "I hold the line - The line of strength
carroll at cs.uiuc.edu             that pulls me through the fear.
Conversation Builder:           San Jacinto - I hold the line - San Jacinto
+ Tomorrow's Tools Today +      Poison bite and darkness take my sight.
Epoch Development Team          I hold the line."
CS Grad / U of Ill @ Urbana    ...{ucbvax,pur-ee,convex}!cs.uiuc.edu!carroll