Disk Built-in Caches: Evaluation on System Performance

Disk drive manufacturers are putting increasingly larger built-in caches into disk drives. Today, 2 MB buffers are common on low-end retail IDE/ATA drives, and some SCSI drives are now available with 16 MB. However, few published data are available to demonstrate that such large built-in caches can noticeably improve overall system performance. In this paper, we investigated the impact of the disk built-in cache on file system response time when the file system buffer cache becomes larger. Via detailed file system and disk system simulation, we arrive at three main conclusions: (1) With a reasonably-sized file system buffer cache (16 MB or more), there is very little performance benefit of using a built-in cache larger than 512 KB. (2) As a readahead buffer, the disk built-in cache provides noticeable performance improvements for workloads with read sequentiality, but has little positive effect on performance if there are more concurrent sequential workloads than cache segments. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: MASCOTS
• Authors: Yingwu Zhu, Yiming Hu
• Keywords: Built-in Caches, Disk Built-in Cache, Disk Drive, MASCOTS 2003, MASCOTS 2007