Prefetching into smart-disk caches for high performance media servers

The paper presents techniques which exploit recent magnetic disk-drive technological developments (such as the existence of embedded drive-level caches and powerful controllers, and the ever-increasing transfer rates). It contributes prefetching techniques into host- and drive-level caches to improve the maximum number of continuous data streams that a drive can support. We show how our techniques can achieve significant performance improvements while guaranteeing the uninterrupted display of the continuous data. In addition, despite our techniques' utilization of drive-level caches, the performance improvements do not come at the expense of additional cache memory (at the host and/or the drive). Given current technology trends, the benefits of our techniques are expected to become even greater.