I stumbled across this old paper by Jim Gray and Chris Nyberg. I’m not sure what year it was written, but it looks like it was the mid ninties.
http://research.microsoft.com/users/Gray/DeskTopBatch.doc
It is always fun and interesting to go back and read things which speculated on the near future and see which parts were correct, which parts were just wrong, and which parts can be considered true, but came about in ways different than what the author suggested, or hinted. The last category is my favorite.
I was searching for a batch processing engine of sorts. In all honesty I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, I only know that if something was out there that would help me, I wanted to use it. This was one of those google hit distractions that was completely worthwhile.
I found section 3.2 particularly interesting “PC and UNIX File Systems are Improving”. It seems almost none of the things mentioned in this section have come to bear. Even the disk throughput numbers are about the same. Hopefully somework will be done in this area over the next few years.