Modeling Hard-Disk Power Consumption

  • Authors:
  • John Zedlewski;Sumeet Sobti;Nitin Garg;Fengzhou Zheng;Arvind Krishnamurthy;Randolph Wang

  • Affiliations:
  • Princeton University;Princeton University;Princeton University;Princeton University;Yale University;Princeton University

  • Venue:
  • FAST '03 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Excessive power consumption is a major barrier to the market acceptance of hard disks in mobile electronic devices. Studying and reducing power consumption, however, often involves running time-intensive disk traces on real hardware with specialized power-monitoring equipment. This paper presents Dempsey, a disk simulation environment that includes accurate modeling of disk power consumption. It includes tools to automatically extract performance and power consumption parameters from a given disk drive, without needing detailed specifications from the manufacturer. The tools use stimulus-based measurements to extract these parameters. Dempsey is experimentally validated for two mobile hard disks, namely, the 1 GB IBM Microdrive and the 5 GB Toshiba Type II PC Card HDD. In the worst observed case, Dempsey's estimate of power consumption differs from the measured consumption by 7.5%. This demonstrates that disk power consumption can be simulated both efficiently and accurately.