Comment Re:But how? (Score 3, Informative) 426
The absolute translation of logical block to head position is unknown to e.g. Linux. While it is possible to reverse engineer the physical disk layout by looking at timings, for general purpose computing this is going way too far. I think the upcoming ATA-7 hard disk standard has some more options to get information about the layout of the disk, but I'm not sure of that.
Anyway, simple sorting on LBA address will typically reduce head seeks to a large extent, resulting in most of the potential benefit. It is important however to make sure that multiple requests are available to the driver to sort.
Anyway, simple sorting on LBA address will typically reduce head seeks to a large extent, resulting in most of the potential benefit. It is important however to make sure that multiple requests are available to the driver to sort.
