Managing storage space in a flash and disk hybrid storage system

This paper considers the problem of efficiently managing storage space in a hybrid storage system employing flash and disk drives. The flash and disk drives exhibit different performance characteristics of read and write behavior. We propose a technique for balancing the workload properties across flash and disk drives in such a hybrid storage system. The presented approach automatically and transparently manages migration of data blocks among flash and disk drives based on their access patterns. This paper presents the design and an evaluation of the proposed approach on a Linux testbed through realistic experiments.