John Zedlewski, Sumeet Sobti, Nitin Garg, Fengzhou Zheng, Arvind
Krishnamurthy, and Randolph Wang.
Modeling Hard-Disk Power Consumption.
Proc. Second Conference on File and Storage
Technologies. March 2003.
Excessive power consumption is a major barrier to the market
acceptance of hard disks in mobile electronic devices. Studying and
reducing power consumption, however, often involves running
time-intensive disk traces on real hardware with specialized
power-monitoring equipment. This paper presents Dempsey, a disk
simulation environment that includes accurate modeling of disk power
consum ption. It includes tools to automatically extract performance
and power consumption parameters from a given disk drive, without
needing detailed specifications from the manufacturer. The tools use
stimulus-based measurements to extract these parameters. Dempsey is
experimentally validated for two mobile hard disks, namely, the 1 GB
IBM Microdrive and the 5 GB Toshiba Type II PC Card HDD. In the worst
observed case, Dempsey's estimate of power consumption differs from
the measured consumption by 7.5%. This demonstrates that disk
power consumption can be simulated both efficiently and accurately.