Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-00-100, November 1999. Superceded by Proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS 2000, Santa Clara, California, June 17-21, 2000.
John Linwood Griffin, Steven W. Schlosser, Gregory R. Ganger and David F. Nagle
Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
MEMS-based storage devices are seen by many as promising replacements for disk drives. Fabricated on CMOS, MEMS-based storage uses thousands of small, mechanical probe tips to access Gigabytes of nonvolatile storage. This paper takes a first step towards understanding the performance characteristics of these devices. Using trace-driven simulation and models based on the physical equations that govern the device's basic characteristics, this work explores how different physical characteristics (e.g., acceleration, data rates) and scheduling algorithms impact the design and performance of MEMS-based storage. Our results show that MEMS-based storage can improve storage access rates by a factor of 5 over conventional disk-based storage, with average access times of under 2 ms. Further, our analysis of scheduling algorithms shows that the relative benefits of request scheduling are similar to standard disks.
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