Performance Evaluation of Host Aware Shingled Magnetic Recording (HA-SMR) Drives

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 66; no. 11; pp. 1932 - 1945
• Main Authors: Fenggang Wu, Ziqi Fan, Ming-Chang Yang, Baoquan Zhang, Xiongzi Ge, Du, David H. C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-11-2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Buffers; characterization; Cleaning; Drives; H-Buffer; Heat-assisted magnetic recording; Host Aware SMR; Magnetic recording; Media; Performance evaluation; Random access memory; Storage systems; system implication
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2017.2713360

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives can benefit large-scale storage systems by reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of dealing with explosive data growth. Among all existing SMR models, Host Aware SMR (HA-SMR) looks the most promising for its backward compatibility with legacy I/O stacks and its ability to use new SMR-specific APIs to support host I/O stack optimization. Building storage systems using HA-SMR drives calls for a deep understanding of the drive's performance characteristics. To accomplish this, we conduct in-depth performance evaluations on HA-SMR drives with a special emphasis on the performance implications of the SMR-specific APIs and how these drives can be deployed in large storage systems. We discover both favorable and adverse effects of using HA-SMR drives under various workloads. We also investigate the drive's performance under legacy production environments using real-world enterprise traces. Finally, we propose a novel host-controlled buffer that can help to reduce the severity of the decline in HA-SMR performance under our discovered unfavorable I/O access patterns. Without a detailed comprehensive design, we show the potential of the host-controlled buffer by a case study.