Should disks be speed demons or brainiacs?

ABSTRACT

Disk drives play a critical role on the performance of I/O intensive applications. Over the years, disk drive performance has grown as a result of advances in magnetic recording density and faster rotational speeds. In essence, the performance driver in disks has been the data rate. In this paper, we show that data rate is going to be increasingly difficult to optimize, due to power/thermal constraints. We argue that disk drive designers should instead focus their efforts on providing more computational capabilities that data intensive applications could leverage in order to boost performance. We also discuss the scope for provisioning powerful processors inside disk drives to provide these computational capabilities.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.3 File Systems Management

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.5 COMPUTER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
      C.5.5 Servers

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.8 Performance

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance