A Study of I/O Performance Improvement in SATA Hard Disks

SATA 하드디스크의 I/O 성능 개선에 관한 연구

A SATA hard disk has been widely used in recent years and NCQ is one of its crucial features. Despite the development from IDE to SATA disk, there is still much room for improvement for a SATA disk. In addition, until now a hard disk is a black box to us and it is very hard to make research at the level of a disk controller. To enhance the performance of NCQ, we try to do I/O clustering over the requests, which combines multiple sequential requests into a single large one. To evaluate the effect of an I/O clustering mechanism, we created a simple but practical SATA hard disk simulator. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective in enhancing the I/O performance of a SATA disk.