10 Introduction to the New Mainframe: Large-Scale Commercial Computing
Disk media is capable of supporting sequential or random processing, but there
are other considerations when high volumes of requests to read or write data are
made. Very large disks are not generally a good solution because this usually
results in the access mechanism being overloaded and queuing to occur. A
larger number of smaller disks gives better response times to I/O requests.
In all cases, there has to be sufficient bandwidth to allow data to be transferred
between main storage and the I/O device. The size of the volumes depends also
on the kind of data to be stored and the kind of application that needs access to
the data. A very careful investigation about the ...