Optimal and Pessimal Orderings of Steiner Triple Systems in Disk Arrays.

Steiner triple systems are well studied combinatorial designs that have been shown to possess properties desirable for the construction of multiple erasure codes in RAID architectures. The ordering of the columns in the parity check matrices of these codes affects system performance. Combinatorial problems involved in the generation of good and bad column orderings are defined, and examined for small numbers of accesses to consecutive data blocks in the disk array. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]