Trail: a track-based logging disk architecture for zero-overhead writes

A novel disk architecture called Trail is proposed to optimize the disk write latency without sacrificing the disk read performance. This architecture features a track-based logging technique, which essentially reduces a disk write latency to the transfer delay. In addition, this disk architecture allows concurrent read/write, and implicit write scheduling without compromising data integrity. Through a synthetic-trace simulation study, we have shown that for transaction processing workloads, the write latency improvement of Trail over conventional disk devices is at least an order of magnitude. Trail's read latency performance is also better in all cases, sometimes the improvement is also over an order of magnitude. In terms of disk bandwidth utilization, the Trail architecture has a close to 100% write bandwidth efficiency and a read bandwidth efficiency at least as good as a conventional disk.<
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