The impact of smart disks and spatial reuse property on RAID-5 storage systems

RAID storage systems using SCSI and traditional disk drives cannot meet the growing demand of new I/O intensive applications. New technologies such as smart disks and SSA are being proposed to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of RAID systems. The objective of this work is to investigate the impact of smart disks and SSA's spatial reuse property on the performance of RAID-5 storage systems. In order to perform this work, we have enhanced CMU's RAIDframe simulator so that it accurately models the overhead of current SCSI and SSA protocols, and we have created smart disk models which include on-drive XOR logic and on-drive caches. We observe that neither smart disks alone nor spatial reuse property alone has much impact on RAID system performance. However, if smart disks and spatial reuse property are properly used in combination, RAID-5 system performance and scalability can be further enhanced. In particular, we propose a parity caching approach to improve the performance of small writes.