Performance and Reliability of Secondary Storage Systems
Haruo Yokota · 2000
Hard disk drives (HDDs) are now capable of storing a large amount of data, and their storage capacities are still rapidly improving. From the performance and reliability point of view, a large capacity HDD, however, has problems. It is, therefore, desirable to improve the performance of a secondary storage system that uses a large number of small HDDs. To maintain a high reliability of such a system, it is essential to keep redundant data in the parallel small HDDs. This paper provides, firstly, an overview of several approaches for constructing reliable parallel disks, as well as their problems. Next, network disk configuration, such as network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) is discussed. Our approach of autonomous disks to provide an efficient secondary storage system is then introduced. Keywords: Hard Disk Drives, Performance, Reliability, RAID, DR-net, SAN, NAS, Autonomous Disks 1.