Modeling Hard-Disk Power Consumption

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.

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  Due to copyright restrictions we are not able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.3 MEMORY STRUCTURES
      B.3.2 Design Styles
          Subjects: Mass storage (e.g., magnetic, optical, RAID)

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.2 Storage Management
          Subjects: Secondary storage
      D.4.8 Performance
          Subjects: Modeling and prediction; Measurements

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.6 Simulation Output Analysis

General Terms:
Design, Management, Measurement, Performance