The access frequency of different files in file system is dissimilar. If file system can optimize the block lay-out of these hot files which are frequently accessed,the performance of file system will be improved. This paper pre-sents a high performance block layout mechanism: Active Block Layout (ABL). ABL can record the access frequencyof every file in file system and actively optimize the block layout of these hot files by block duplicating. The duplicatedblocks can be placed in the special zone of track,which is called "Cooling Zone". ABL can automatically determine theplacing position and the copy count of the blocks which need to be duplicated. In order to reduce the overhead of blockduplication,this paper also presents a mechanism which uses the potential disk bandwidth to realize the block duplica-tion,and does not obviously degrade the performance of file system.
