Improving application launch times with hybrid disks
CODES+ISSS '09 Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
Lifetime and QoS-aware energy-saving buffering schemes
Journal of Systems and Software
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One of the goals of upcoming hybrid hard disks is to reduce power consumption by adding a small amount of non-volatile flash memory (NVCache) to the drive itself. By using the NVCache to satisfy writes while the rotating media is spun-down, hard disk power consumption can be decreased by lengthening low-power periods. However, the NVCache must eventually be flushed back to the rotating media in order to cache additional data. In this paper we explore two questions: when and how should NVCache content be flushed to rotating media in order to minimize the overhead of data synchronization. We show that by using traditional I/O mechanisms such as merging and reordering, combined with a "flush only when full" policy, flushing performance improves significantly.