Power reduction of multiple disks using dynamic cache resizing and speed control

• Authors: Le Cai;Yung-Hsiang Lu
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
• Year: 2006

This paper presents an energy-conservation method for multiple disks and their cache memory. Our method periodically resizes the cache memory and controls the rotation speeds under performance constraints. The cache memory stores the data from the disks for reuse. Enlarging the cache memory reduces disk accesses and disk utilization. This allows the disks to reduce their speeds and conserve energy because the disks' power consumption is quadratic to their speeds. However, the cache memory itself consumes power to retain data. Shrinking cache memory can save memory power while increasing disk accesses and degrading performance. Choosing proper cache sizes and rotation speeds can reduce the energy consumption of both memory and disks with satisfactory performance. We model cache resizing and speed setting as an optimization problem with minimizing the power consumption as objective and limiting disk utilization as constraints. We compare our method with the methods resizing cache based on request rates. The simulation results show that our method achieves better energy savings while limiting disk access latency.