Saving power in flash and disk hybrid storage system

Abstract

This paper considers the question of saving energy in the disk drive making advantage of diverse devices in a hybrid storage system employing flash and disk drives. The flash and disk offer different power characteristics, being flash much less power consuming than the disk drive. We propose a technique that uses a flash device as a cache for a single disk device. We examine various options for managing the flash and disk devices in such a hybrid system and show that the proposed method saves energy in diverse scenarios. We implemented a simulator composed of disk and flash devices. This paper gives an overview of the design and evaluation of the proposed approach with the help of realistic workloads.