Placement of Continuous Media in Multi-zone Disks

For applications with large data sets, e.g., video servers, magnetic disks have established themselves as the mass storage device of choice. A technique to increase the storage capacity of disks is zoning. A side-eeect of zoning is that it introduces a disk drive with variable transfer rates. This chapter describes techniques to support a continuous display of constant-bit rate video and audio objects using a multi-zone disk drive. As compared to previous approaches, the proposed techniques harness the average transfer rate of each magnetic disk (instead of its minimum transfer rate). In addition, we describe a connguration planner that logically manipulates the zoning information of a disk drive to support the performance criteria of an application. We present performance numbers from an experimental prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.