Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) storage

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are being developed now. Although SMR drives use nearly the same magnetics and electronics as traditional HDDs, they are expected to have substantially different software and behavior, primarily due to using LBA indirection mechanisms. SMRs could improve random-write performance considerably, but potentially harm sequential-read performance. It is not clear how other workloads may fare. In addition, SMRs include LBA indirection mechanisms such as SSD's FTLs, require garbage-collection and de-fragmentation, and more. All these changes suggest that SMRs will behave substantially differently than any other non-volatile storage device in existence. In this project we explore the key behavioral properties of SMRs, and we develop storage software to work with SMRs.

Technical Reports:

#	Title (click for html version)	Formats	Published In	Date	Comments
1	Evaluation of Nilfs2 for Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Disks	PDF BibTeX	Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-14-03	Sep 2014

Past Students:

#	Name (click for home page)	Program	Period	Current Location
1	Benixon Arul Dhas	MS	Sep 2012 - May 2013	Senior Software Engineer at Samsung Semiconductor (San Jose, CA)
2	Sphurti Sortur	MS	Sep 2012 - Dec 2012	Software Engineer, Cisco Systems (San Jose, CA)

Sponsors:

#	Sponsor	Amount	Period	Type	Title (click for award abstract)
1	Western Digital Corporation	$50,000	2013-2014	Sole PI	Singled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks