ABSTRACT

Carnegie Mellon University M.Sc. Dissertation: August, 1995.

RAID for Mobile Computers

Rachad Youssef

Carnegie Mellon University
Information Networking Institute
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

The requirement for high-performance, highly available storage for file servers and super-computing systems led to the development of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) and log-structured file systems (LFS). For mobile computers, however, performance is often a secondary requirement to long battery life. This study examines the design issues of low-power, highly available disk arrays for mobile computers. Specifically, by dynamically remapping the location of newly written data using a log-based allocation strategy and by deferring parity updates in an NV-RAM cache, the rate of drive spin-ups can be reduced by a factor of 2.

FULL THESIS: pdf / postscript