Patent ID: 6981112

Claim:
A method of accessing data from a storage medium, the method comprising, in response to a request to access data associated with a cache locale on the storage medium: (a) determining whether a cache exists for the cache locale, wherein the cache locale comprises a first directory on the storage medium; (b) if a cache for the cache locale does not exist, determining whether to disable caching based upon a cache payback parameter determined from prior accesses to the storage medium, wherein the cache payback parameter is associated with a hit count associated with the first directory and representing a number of consecutive requests that are associated with the same directory on the storage medium; (c) disabling caching if a determination is made that caching should be disabled; and (d) building a cache for the cache locale if a determination is made that caching should not be disabled, wherein building the cache comprises building and caching directory information about the first directory on the storage medium; wherein the method further comprises, after building the cache, incrementing the hit count associated with the first directory in response to each subsequent consecutive request associated with the first directory, and resetting the hit count associated with the first directory in response to a subsequent request associated with a second directory that is different from the first directory.