On Improving the Write Responsiveness for Host-Aware SMR Drives

Ming-Chang Yang*, Yuan-Hao Chang, Fenggang Wu, Tei-Wei Kuo, David H. C. Du

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper presents a Virtual Persistent Cache design to remedy the long latency behavior and to ultimately improve the write responsiveness of the Host-Aware Shingled Magnetic Recording (HA-SMR) drives. Our design keeps the cost-effective model of the existing HA-SMR drives, but at the same time asks the great help from the host system for adaptively providing some computing and management resources to improve the drive performance when needed. The technical contribution is to trick the HA-SMR drives by smartly reshaping the access patterns to HA-SMR drives, so as to avoid the occurrences of long latencies in most cases and thus to ultimately improve the drive performance and responsiveness. We conduct experiments on real Seagate 8 TB HA-SMR drives to demonstrate the advantages of Virtual Persistent Cache over the real workloads from Microsoft Research Cambridge. The results show that the proposed design can remedy most of the long latencies and improve the drive performance by at least 58.11 percent, under the evaluated workloads.
Original languageEnglish
Article number8387485
Pages (from-to)111-124
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume68
Issue number1
Online published19 Dec 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019
Externally publishedYes

Research Keywords

  • Host-aware
  • long latency behavior
  • persistent cache
  • shingled magnetic recording (SMR)

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