Dr. Darrell Long

NVCache: Increasing the Effectiveness of Disk Spindown Algorithms with Caching

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)

September 2006View full paper

Abstract

Being one of the few mechanical components in a typical computer system, hard drives consume a significant amount of the overall power used by a computer. Spinning down a hard drive reduces its power consumption, but only works when no disk accesses occur, limiting overall effectiveness. We have designed and implemented a technique to extend disk spin-down times using a small non-volatile storage cache called NVCache, which contains a combination of caching techniques to service reads and writes while the hard disk is in low-power mode. We show that combining NVCache with an adaptive disk spin-down algorithm, a hard disk’s power consumption can be reduced by up to 90%.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{bisson-mascots06,
  author       = {Timothy Bisson and Scott A. Brandt and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {NVCache: Increasing the Effectiveness of Disk Spin-down Algorithms with Caching},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS)},
  organization = {IEEE},
  address      = {Monterey},
  pages        = {422--432},
  month        = sep,
  year         = {2006}
}
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