This section describes the disk structure of the GFS Shared File System.
As illustrated below, the disk structure of the GFS Shared File System consists of the following elements:
The GFS Shared File System manages the V-data area in units of 1,024 bytes and the file data area in unit of 8,192 bytes.
Conventional file systems have decentralized meta-data areas on their disks. However, the GFS Shared File System centralizes meta-data to improve meta-data access performance. Besides, localizing updated portions upon recovery of the file system allows the update log area to shorten the recovery time.