Dedicating disks to reading or writing

A method of increasing the speed of disk reading and writing operations in a database system comprising:

• at the database system having one or more nodes comprising one or more processors and memory, the memory of the one or more nodes storing one or more programs to be executed by the one or more processors,
• wherein the data in the database is partitioned into one or more buckets and at least two replicas of each bucket of data are stored in different storage devices of the one or more nodes;
• determining a subset of storage devices that will be dedicated to writing, while keeping at least one replica of each bucket dedicated to reading;
• dedicating at least a substantial portion of the remaining storage devices to reading, wherein designating at least one bucket for writing comprises:
• determining a loop ranging from which one or more nodes have been written to least recently, to which one or more nodes have been written to most recently;
• determining which buckets of each of the one or more nodes in the loop need read operations;
• and
• if none of the buckets on the respective one or more nodes need read operations, designating the node to operate a set of write operations.