Disk contention is a situation occurring when multiple processes try to access the same disk(s) and the requests outrun the response times of the drive(s). This happens because most disks are restricted in the amount of data they can transfer and the number of accesses (I/O operations) they can handle each second. Disk contention became a more prominent problem when CPU speeds dramatically increased over the past 15 years, putting even greater demands on disk-based data storage and causing the modern data centers’ most significant operational constraint.