Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-00-136, May 2000. Superceded by Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2000.
John Linwood Griffin, Steven W. Schlosser, Gregory R. Ganger, David F. Nagle*
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Computer Science*
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/
MEMS-based storage devices promise significant performance, reliability,
and power improvements relative to disk drives. This paper explores
how the physical characteristics of these devices change four aspects
of operating system management: request scheduling, data placement,
failure management, and power management. Adaptations of disk request
scheduling algorithms are found to be appropriate for these devices;
however, new data placement schemes are shown to better match their
differing mechanical positioning characteristics. With aggressive internal
redundancy, MEMS-based storage devices can tolerate failure modes that
cause data loss for disks. In addition, MEMS-based storage devices enable
a finer granularity of OS-level power management because the devices
can be stopped and started rapidly and their mechanical components can
be individually enabled or disabled to reduce power consumption.
FULL PAPER, TR VERSION: pdf / postscript
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