The declining costs of commodity disk drives is rapidly changing the economics of deploying large amounts of online or near-line storage. Conventional mass storage systems use either high performance RAID clusters, automated tape libraries or a combination of tape and disk. In this paper, we analyze an alternative design using massive arrays of idle disks, or MAID. We argue that this storage organization provides storage densities matching or exceeding those of tape libraries with performance similar to disk arrays. Moreover, we show that with effective power management of individual drives, this performance can be achieved using a very small power budget. In particular, we show that our power management strategy can result in the performance comparable to an always-on RAID system while using the power of such a RAID system.
Besides, the Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) technique uses extra cache disks to cache recently accessed data REF .
Massive Arrays of Idle Disks For Storage Archives
ACM/IEEE SC 2002 Conference (SC'02)
ACM/IEEE SC 2002 Conference (SC'02)
Computer Science