Power Conservation Strategies for MEMS-Based Storage Devices

• Authors: Y. Lin;S. A. Brandt;D. D. E. Long;E. L. Miller
• Venue: MASCOTS '02 Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems
• Year: 2002

Power dissipation by storage systems in mobile computersaccounts for a large percentage of the power consumedby the entire system. Reducing the power used by the storagedevice is crucial for reducing overall power consumption.A new class of secondary storage devices based onmicroelectromechanical systems (MEMS) promises to consumean order of magnitude less power with 10-20 timesshorter latency and 10 times greater storage densities. Wedescribe three strategies to reduce power consumption: aggressivespin-down, sequential request merging, and sub-sectoraccesses. We show that aggressive spin-down cansave up to 50% of the total energy consumed by the deviceat the cost of increased response time. Merging of sequentialrequests can save up to 18% of the servicing energy andreduce response time by about 20%. Transferring less datafor small requests such as those for metadata can save 40%of the servicing energy. Finally, we show that by applyingall three power management strategies simultaneously thetotal power consumption of MEMS-based storage devicescan be reduced by about 54% with no impact on I/O performance.