Shingled Write Disk Emulator

Published as Storage Systems Research Center Technical Report UCSC-SSRC-12-05.

Abstract

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology is expected to play a major role in the next generation of hard disk drives. SMR introduces some unique challenges to system software researchers and prototype hardware is not readily available for the broader research community, making it difficult to explore solutions optimized for SMR disks. It is crucial to work on system software in parallel to hardware manufacturing, to ensure successful and effective adoption of this technology. This project is 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. The emulator was implemented as a pseudo block device driver and the performance overhead incurred by employing the emulator was evaluated. 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. Parts of this report that describes the above has been published. In addition, this report also contains a section that serves as a reference on how to setup and use the Shingled Write Disk Emulator.

Publication date:
August 2012

Authors:
Rekha Pitchumani

Projects:
Shingled Disk

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@techreport{pitchumani-ssrctr-12-05,
  author       = {Rekha Pitchumani},
  title        = {Shingled Write Disk Emulator},
  institution  = {University of California, Santa Cruz},
  number       = {UCSC-SSRC-12-05},
  month        = aug,
  year         = {2012},
}