Efficient utilization of zoned-disk bandwidth for video servers

Studies on video servers have focused on improving the throughput of storage devices and the real-time retrieval and delivery of large amounts of video data. Previous studies on the improvement of disk throughput mainly focused on reducing the overhead of disk seeking in order to obtain higher disk throughput. However, these studies did not consider the actual characteristics of hard disks. Recently, the zoning technique has been applied to increase disk capacity. The significant effect of disk zoning is that the data transfer rates (bandwidths) increase from the intermost to the intermost zones. In this study, we present a novel data placement scheme with various block sizes on different regions of a hard disk. In our scheme, we can not only reduce the seek time overhead, but also use the advantages of various bandwidths from a disk to achieve higher throughput. Compared with previous studies, our proposed scheme can improve disk throughput significantly, which can support more users with the same buffer requirement.