Author(s)

Dominik Strzałka, Piotr Szurlej

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Taking into account the fact that the computer systems, as the implementations of Turing machine, are physical devices, the paper shows considerations in which hard drive behavior will be presented in terms of statistical mechanics. Because computer is a machine, its analysis cannot be based only on mathematical models apart of physical conditions. In the paper it will be presented a very narrow part this problem – an analysis of hard drive behavior in the context of the power-law distributions. We will focus only on four selected hard drive parameters, i.e. the rate of transfer bytes to or from the disk during the read or write, the number of pending requests to the disk and the rate of read operations. Our research was performed under the Windows operating system and this allows to make a statistical analysis for the possible occurrence of power-laws representing the lack of characteristic scale for considered processes. This property will be confirmed in all analyzed cases. A presented study can help describing the behavior of the whole computer system in terms of physics of computer processing.

Power Laws, Hard Drive Behavior, Performance Monitor, Windows Operating System, Physics of Computer Processing

D. Strzałka and P. Szurlej, "Power-Law Distributions in Hard Drive Behavior," Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, Vol. 4 No. 12, 2011, pp. 710-717. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2011.412083.