Lucent Technologies Inc.

Phillio B Gibbons

Yossi Matias

Elizabeth A Shriver

Bruce K Hillyer

Jeffrey S Vitter

Rakesh D Barve

A method for estimating and read durations, in response to requests to read data blocks stored in the disk drives in a computer system having a plurality of disk drives. Each disk drive has a disk cache with a non-zero fence parameter value coupled to a host computer via a common bus. The method according to one embodiment, comprises the steps of: (a) measuring an overhead period corresponding to the time during which a request to read is transmitted to a disk drive via the bus; (b) measuring an expected minimum positioning time corresponding to the shortest time required for a disk drive to locate said data block; (c) measuring mechanism-to-cache read time corresponding to the time required for a disk drive to transfer a data portion B,to a disk cache; (d) measuring the time required to transfer data blocks stored in each of said disk caches to the host; and (e) adding the times measured at steps (a) through (d).

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Westfield, NJ, United States of America

Phillio B Gibbons