OVERVIEW

Media Rich applications such as Desktop Publishing, Digital Video Editing, Gaming, etc. offer a very rich interface and immersive user experience. They work on data sets (images, video, textures, sounds, worlds) that are too large and changes too frequently to be statically held in a desktop computer's main memory. As a consequence, a media rich application issues a large numbers of disk requests and ends up waiting for these disk-based data requests to be fulfilled. Waiting for the application to progress, results in poor user experience leading to inefficiency and loss of productivity.

The reason for this stalling is that disks are much slower than processors, and the media rich application ends up wasting a significant portion of its execution time waiting for disk I/O requests to complete.

Maxtream is a set of device drivers and helper applications to turbo charge your Desktop multimedia experience. It accelerates I/O and improves the overall experience. It works with the disk driver to deliver superior system cache management, intelligently caching data in RAM before it is read from the drive, and pre-fetching what your application would need -- asynchronously and ahead of time from an optimized disk layout. It provides an innovative solution to the following three show stoppers of disk performance.

This product is available for licensing jointly from Maxtor and AmSoft Systems. Please send your request to maxtream@amsoft.net for further information.

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KEY FEATURES

• Better Cache Management : Maxtream uses a sophisticated cache replacement algorithm that leverages both Recency and Frequency of data to maximize the Hit Rate - the fraction of pages that can be served from the main memory -- reducing Disk I/O and minimizing stall time.



• Hinting the Drive : Maxtream works with the Disk Driver to hint the next data stream to pre-fetch optimizing the head movement. The hints tell the disk driver when to read-ahead some data and when to let go of the opportunity based on adaptive and dynamic strategy that fetches the most useful (based on time cost) data while minimizing disk seeks, latency and head movement.



• Predictive Pre-Fetch : Maxtream exploits the correlation between consecutive accesses of different data files in an application because an application typically accesses roughly the same set of files in roughly the same order every time it executes, especially when they are executed by the same user. This knowledge of the user, the access pattern for a given context or level in a game is used to predict and pre-fetch data streams from the hard disk without waiting for the application to request the data.

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HIGHLIGHTS

• Accelerates I/O Performance : Maxtream accelerates your multimedia performance by improving the Cache Hit Rate and reduces random disk seeks giving you a seamlessly flowing experience.



• Plug and Play functionality : Maxtream does not require any changes to your system or application software and gets installed quickly without having to reformat, move or copy existing data. It does require a reboot to launch itself.



• Dynamic, Adaptive and Self-tuning : Although Maxtream does benefit from a pre-profiled applications, its self-tuning and adaptive algorithms make it possible to give you the performance boost upfront that keeps improving as you run the application many times.

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