hashFS: Applying Hashing to Optimize File Systems for Small File Reads

Today's file systems typically need multiple disk accesses for a single read operation of a file. In the worst case, when none of the needed data is already in the cache, the metadata for each component of the file path has to be read in. Once the metadata of the file has been obtained, an additional disk access is needed to read the actual file data. For a target scenario consisting almost exclus…