Improving multimedia systems performance using constant-density recording disks

Multimedia systems store and retrieve large amounts of data which require e xtremely high disk bandwidth and their performance critically depends on th e efficiency of disk storage. However, existing magnetic disks are designed for small amounts of data retrievals geared to traditional operations; wit h speed improvements mainly focused on how to reduce seek time and rotation al latency. When the same mechanism is applied to multimedia systems, overh eads in disk I/O can result in dramatic deterioration in system performance . In this paper, we present a mathemati- cal model to evaluate the performa nce of constant-density recording disks, and use this model to analyze quan titatively the performance of multimedia data request streams. We show that high disk throughput may be achieved by suitably adjusting the relevant pa rameters. In addition to demonstrating quantitatively that constant-density recording disks perform significantly better than traditional disks for mu ltimedia data storage, a novel disk-partitioning scheme which places data a ccording to their bandwidths is presented.