Long-Range Dependence at the Disk Drive Level

Nowadays, the need for storage devices arises in a wide range of computer and electronic devices such as enterprise systems, personal computers, and consumer electronics. Understanding workloads at the disk level in these different systems is essential for enhancement of disk reliability, availability, and performance. In this paper, we present a characterization of disk drive workloads in a wide range of applications and computing environments. Although often idle, disk drives in all environments exhibit high variability and strong burstiness in interarrival-times and request location. We identify long-range dependence as a key statistical characteristic that should be taken into consideration when modeling storage systems and synthetic workload generators