NVCache: Increasing the Effectiveness of Disk Spindown Algorithms with Caching

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

Abstract

Being one of the few mechanical components in a typ- ical 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 effec- tiveness. 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 combina- tion of caching techniques to service reads and writes while the hard disk is in low-power mode. We show that combin- ing NVCache with an adaptive disk spin-down algorithm, a hard disk’s power consumption can be reduced by up to 90%.

Publication date:
September 2006

Authors:
Timothy Bisson
Scott A. Brandt
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Archival Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

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