One method for improving RAID5 performance

As a kind of parallel storage system, RAID5 has been becoming a popular solution for providing better performance at low cost and without sacrificing much redundant data, its main disadvantage is poor performance. It is a general method to improve RAID5 performance by using cache. However, it often happens that the data is not hit in cache, in this case, the RAID5 performance also will be very poor. The method based on combination of disk I/O operations has been proposed for impriving the I/O response time through reducing the number of low-level operations. According to theoretic analysis and experimental test, we find that RAID5 access time and data transfer rate could be largely improved than conventional method. Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 69773046 and (69973017), and Defense Advanced Research Foundation of China under grant (98J15. 1. 1. JW0516) Biography, Chen Qiong (1963-), female, Ph. D candidate, research interests: computer architecture, parallel processing, disk arrays.