| | [3.1] Extent-based versus log-structured file systems |
 | | The approach used under QNX, for example, is to have files exist as an array of extents on disk, where each is extent is as many contiguous blocks as could be allocated at that location. |
 | | This approach allows the unit of disk space allocation to remain 512 bytes, which is also the smallest unit of physical I/O. The potential performance bottleneck of this approach does not happen because the filesystem code passes I/O requests to the disk drivers in units of extents, not 512 byte blocks. |
 | | The filesystem also heuristically modifies the size of the pre-read requests based on the historical access pattern to the file. |
| www.faqs.org /faqs/os-research/part1/section-12.html (262 words) |