Emulating a Shingled Write Disk

Appeared in Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2012).

Abstract

Shingled Magnetic Recording technology is expected to play a major role in the next generation of hard disk drives. But it introduces some unique challenges to system software researchers and prototype hardware is not readily available for the broader research community. It is crucial to work on system software in parallel to hardware manufacturing, to ensure successful and effective adoption of this technology. In this work, we present a novel Shingled Write Disk (SWD) emulator that uses a hard disk utilizing traditional Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) and emulates a Shingled Write Disk on top of it. We implemented the emulator as a pseudo block device driver and evaluated the performance overhead incurred by employing the emulator. The emulator has a slight overhead which is only measurable during pure sequential reads and writes. The moment disk head movement comes into picture, due to any random access, the emulator overhead becomes so insignificant as to become immeasurable.

Publication date:
August 2012

Authors:
Rekha Pitchumani
Andy Hospodor
Ahmed Amer
Yangwook Kang
Ethan L. Miller
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Shingled Disk

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{pitchumani-mascots12,
  author       = {Rekha Pitchumani and Andy Hospodor and Ahmed Amer and Yangwook Kang and Ethan L. Miller and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {Emulating a Shingled Write Disk},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2012)},
  month        = aug,
  year         = {2012},
}