by steve-myers » Wed Nov 06, 2019 2:20 am
Back in the days before RAID type DASD, multiple extents had a potential performance impact because they often required unproductive movement of the the disk's access mechanism.
With RAID type DASD, in a technical sense, this is no longer true. The RAID mechanism scatters your data all over the physical media in ways you cannot control regardless of the extent definition. In any event, opening the data usually loads the data into the RAID controller's cache memory, so no additional I/O to the RAID device's physical media is required.
The primary advantage of reducing DASD extents is it forces the logical data into contiguous logical space, which looks better on reports. There is little, if any, performance impact from consolidating extents.
This appears to be something dreamed up by a more ignorant than usual PHB type.