Energy-efficient disk replacement and file placement techniques for mobile systems with hard disks

ABSTRACT

Mobile systems have usually used hard disks as the secondary storage devices because of their high capacity per cost and high I/O throughput. However, their high power consumption is the main limiting factor for extending their adoptions in mobile systems. In this paper, we propose enhanced file placement techniques for mobile platforms with multiple smaller disks (instead of a single large disk). We investigate that how many smaller disks are necessary to obtain energy saving while maintaining the required performance using both a simplified energy model and a realistic trace-based simulator under the proposed multiple disk configurations. We also propose energy-efficient file placement techniques, which aggregate files with common attributes the same set of disks. By skewing I/O operations, the proposed techniques achieve additional energy saving. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can reduce the energy consumption by up to 43% when eight 1" disks are used instead of a single 2.5" disk with an acceptable increase in the average response time.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.2 Storage Management
          Subjects: Secondary storage

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
disk replacement, energy saving, file placement, mobile systems, multiple disks