Sadananda Pai, VinaySchaffer, Alejandro A.Varman, Peter J.2015-09-152015-09-151994-06-06V. Sadananda Pai, A. A. Schaffer and P. J. Varman, "Markov analysis of multiple-disk prefetching strategies for external merging," vol. 128, no. 1-2, 1994.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/81646Multiple-disk organizations can be used to improve the I/O performance of problems like external merging. Concurrency can be introduced by overlapping I/O requests at different disks and by prefetching additional blocks on each I/O operation. To support this prefetching, a memory cache is required. Markov models for two prefetching strategies are developed and analyzed. Closed-form expressions for the average parallelism obtainable for a given cache size and number of disks are derived for both prefetching strategies. These analytic results are confirmed by simulation.engJournal articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0304-3975(94)90170-8