Skylight—a window on shingled disk operation

Abutalib Aghayev, Peter Desnoyers

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

66 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce Skylight, a novel methodology that combines software and hardware techniques to reverse engineer key properties of drive-managed Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives. The software part of Skylight measures the latency of controlled I/O operations to infer important properties of drive-managed SMR, including type, structure, and size of the persistent cache; type of cleaning algorithm; type of block mapping; and size of bands. The hardware part of Skylight tracks drive head movements during these tests, using a high-speed camera through an observation window drilled through the cover of the drive. These observations not only confirm inferences from measurements, but resolve ambiguities that arise from the use of latency measurements alone. We show the generality and efficacy of our techniques by running them on top of three emulated and two real SMR drives, discovering valuable performance-relevant details of the behavior of the real SMR drives.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2015
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages135-149
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781931971201
StatePublished - 2015
Event13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2015 - Santa Clara, United States
Duration: Feb 16 2015Feb 19 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2015

Conference

Conference13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Clara
Period2/16/152/19/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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