Patent ID: 7882373
Filing Date: 2011-02-01
Classification: G06F,Y02D

Abstract:
1. A method for reducing power consumption in a storage system by shortening seek distances associated with input/output (I/O) requests to a physical disk drive, the method comprising: setting a sweep direction; evaluating an offset of a new I/O request to determine whether to send the new I/O request to the physical disk drive; sending the new I/O request to the physical disk drive if the offset is consistent with the sweep direction, otherwise deferring sending the new I/O request to the disk drive until the sweep direction reverses direction; maintaining a list of pending I/O requests sent to the physical disk drive, an upper bound parameter representing a highest offset of I/O requests on the pending I/O list, and a lower bound parameter representing a lowest offset of the I/O requests on the pending I/O list; and searching for a write pending in cache with an offset between the lower and upper bound parameters for writing to the physical disk drive.