Does the Sun 7000 do read ahead/prefetch on sequential reads?
Yes. The 7000 will prefetch sequential reads (both forward and reverse). It will also detect strided reads (both forward and reverse). So, multiple processes reading from the same file will get the cache benefit of that prefetched data. The system has multiple prefetch streams. This allows it to detect sequential reads on several files and prefetch for all of them. That provides for very good streaming read performance from the ARC. Any read that was brought into the ARC by a prefetch will not use the L2ARC. See the SSD section for more details.
