Amphisbaena: A Novel Persistent Buffer Management Strategy to Improve SMR Disk Performance

Abstract

The explosive growth of massive data makes shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disks a promising candidate for balancing capacity and cost. SMR disks are typically configured with a persistent buffer to reduce the read–modify–write (RMW) overhead introduced by non-sequential writes. Traditional SMR zones-based persistent buffers are subject to sequential-write constraints, and frequent cleanups cause disk performance degradation. Conventional magnetic recording (CMR) zones with in-place update capabilities enable less frequent cleanups and are gradually being used to construct persistent buffers in certain SMR disks. However, existing CMR zones-based persistent buffer designs fail to accurately capture hot blocks with long update periods and are limited by an inflexible data layout, resulting in inefficient cleanups. To address the above issues, we propose a strategy called Amphisbaena. First, a two-phase data block classification method is proposed to capture frequently updated blocks. Then, a locality-aware buffer space management scheme is developed to dynamically manage blocks with different update frequencies. Finally, a latency-sensitive garbage collection policy based on the above is designed to mitigate the impact of cleanup on user requests. Experimental results show that Amphisbaena reduces latency by an average of 29.9% and the number of RMWs by an average of 37% compared to current state-of-the-art strategies.