Hierarchical caching and prefetching for continuous media servers with smart disks

This article contributes algorithms that improve the performance of continuous media servers. The authors measure performance in terms of the maximum number of continuous data streams that a drive can support, the total RAM size requirements, and the start-up latency. These caching and prefetching algorithms in the host and disk-embedded caches that can improve the maximum number of streams a drive can support, with small start-up latencies. In addition, they show that the performance improvements do not come at the expense of total additional cache memory (at the host and/or the drive).