Extract and infer quickly

Abstract

The modern hard disk drive is a complex and complicated device. It consists of 2-4 heads, thousands of sectors per track, several hundred thousands of tracks, and tens of zones. The beginnings of adjacent tracks are placed with a certain angular offset. Sectors are placed on the tracks and accessed in some order. Angular offset and sector placement order vary widely subject to vendors and models. The success of an efficient file and storage subsystem design relies on the proper understanding of the underlying storage device characteristics. The characterization of hard disk drives has been a subject of intense research for more than a decade. The scale and complexity of state-of-the-art hard disk drive technology calls for a new way of extracting and analyzing the characteristics of the hard disk drive. In this work, we develop a novel disk characterization suite, DIG (Disk Geometry Analyzer), which allows us to rapidly extract and characterize the key performance metrics of the modern hard disk drive. Development of this tool is accompanied by thorough examination of four off-the-shelf hard disk drives. DIG consists of three key ingredients: O(1) a track boundary detection algorithm; O(log n) a zone boundary detection algorithm; and hybrid sampling based seek time profiling. We particularly focus on addressing the scalability aspect of disk characterization. With DIG, we are able to extract key metrics of hard disk drives, for example, track sizes, zone information, sector geometry and so on, within 3-20 minutes. DIG allows us to determine the sector layout mechanism of the underlying hard disk drive, for example, hybrid serpentine, cylinder serpentine, and surface serpentine, and to a build complete sector map from LBN to the three dimensional space of (Cylinder, Head, Sector). Examining the hard disk drives with DIG, we made a number of important observations. In modern hard disk drives, head switch overhead is far greater than track switch overhead. It seems that hard disk drive vendors put greater emphasis on reducing the number of head switches for data access. Most disk vendors use surface serpentine, cylinder serpentine, or hybrid serpentine schemes in laying sectors on the platters. The legacy seek time model, which takes the form of a+ b √ d leaves much to be desired for use in modern hard disk drives especially for short seeks (less than 5000 tracks). We compare the performance of the DIG against the existing state-of-the-art disk profiling algorithm. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art disk characterization algorithm, the DIG algorithm significantly decreases the time to extract comprehensive sector geometry information from 1920 minutes to 7 minutes and 1927 minutes to 180 minutes in best and worst case scenarios, respectively. ACM Reference Format:Gim, J. and Won, Y. 2010. Extract and infer quickly: Obtaining sector geometry of modern hard disk drive.