Contiguous Placement on Hierarchical Storage Systems

Abstract

The contiguous placement is the most common method to place traditional data files on tertiary storage devices. The storage space in the media units is checked. The data file is stored on a media unit with enough space to store the data file. When tertiary storage devices are used to store multimedia objects, the objects are stored and retrieved similar to traditional data files. Since the main application of the tertiary storage devices is to back up multimedia objects from computers, the objectives of the contiguous method are: 1. supporting back up of multimedia objects efficiently, and 2. reducing the number of separate media units that are used to store an object. We will describe in the next sections the simple contiguous placement method. Afterwards, the log structured placement method is explained before we summarize this chapter.