OPTIMAL CLUSTERING SIZE OF SMALL FILE ACCESS IN NET WORK ATTACHED STORAGE DEVICE

Email and short message service are pervasive on the Internet now and continue to grow rapidly, which propels the research on small file access in storage systems. The Clustering technology places logical data blocks of multiple small files on physically contiguous disk blocks and accesses them as a single unit, which is normally adopted to improve small file access performance. This paper constructs a mathematical analysis model to discover the optimal clustering size of small file access in Network Attached Storage (NAS). The analysis results indicate that the optimal clustering size for small file access is the product of one cylinder size and disk number in NAS. Experimental results give a useful validation of our analysis. The analysis results can be applied to optimize the NAS oriented system software and the corresponding application software design.