Adaptive blocks rearrangement

An adaptive technique for reducing disk seek times is described. The technique copies frequently referenced blocks from their original locations to reserved space near the center of the disk. Reference frequencies need not be known in advance. Instead, they are estimated by monitoring the stream of arriving requests. Results of trace-driven simulations show that seek times can be cut in half by copying only a small number of blocks using this technique. The technique is designed to be implemented in a device driver or controller. It is independent of the file system or database manager that uses the disk