EED: Energy Efficient Disk drive architecture

Abstract

Energy efficiency has become one of the most important challenges in designing future computing systems, and the storage system is one of the largest energy consumers within them. This paper proposes an Energy Efficient Disk (EED) drive architecture which integrates a relatively small-sized NAND flash memory into a traditional disk drive to explore the impact of the flash memory on the performance and energy consumption of the disk. The EED monitors data access patterns and moves the frequently accessed data from the magnetic disk to the flash memory. Due to the data migration, most of the data accesses can be satisfied with the flash memory, which extends the idle period of the disk drive and enables the disk drive to stay in a low power state for an extended period of time. Because flash memory consumes considerably less energy and the read access is much faster than a magnetic disk, the EED can save significant amounts of energy while reducing the average response time. Real trace driven simulations are employed to validate the proposed disk drive architecture. An energy coefficient, which is the product of the average response time and the average energy consumption, is proposed as a performance metric to measure the EED. The simulation results, along with the energy coefficient, show that the EED can achieve an 89.11% energy consumption reduction and a 2.04% average response time reduction with cello99 trace, a 7.5% energy consumption reduction and a 45.15% average response time reduction with cello96 trace, and a 20.06% energy consumption reduction and a 6.02% average response time reduction with TPC-D trace, respectively. Traditionally, energy conservation and performance improvement are contradictory. The EED strikes a good balance between conserving energy and improving performance.