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Question: How does ECS efficiently write both small and large unstructured data?
For smaller writes to storage, ECS uses a method called box carting to minimize impact to performance. Box carting aggregates multiple smaller writes of 2MB or less in memory and writes them in a single disk operation. Box carting limits the number of roundtrips to disk required process individual writes.
For writes of larger objects, nodes within ECS can process write requests for the same object simultaneously and take advantage of simultaneous writes across multiple spindles in the ECS cluster. Writes of objects less than 128MB in size are tripled mirrored across three nodes, with one of the three being distributed in its erasure coded format, waiting for the chunk to completely fill before calculating the EC bits. Objects larger than 128MB in size skip the triple mirroring step, with 128MB portions of the object distributed in its erasure coded format across the nodes in the storage pool. Thus, ECS can ingest and store small and large objects efficiently.