MAGIC: Making IMR-Based HDD Perform Like CMR-Based HDD

Abstract

The past decades have witnessed the tremendous success of Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR)-based Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in data storage. To eliminate the bottleneck of CMR-based HDDs in providing higher areal density, an emerging Interlaced Magnetic Recording (IMR) is capable of achieving higher areal density with limited changes to disk makeup. Nevertheless, existing approaches for IMR-based HDDs may suffer serious read and write performance degradation as compared with CMR-based HDDs. Thus, this article presents a device-level solution, namely <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MAGIC</i> translation layer, which aims at <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><u>MA</u></b> kin <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><u>G</u></b> <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><u>I</u></b> MR-based HDDs perform like <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><u>C</u></b> MR-based HDDs in terms of comparable access performance. Specifically, not merely trying to improve the performance of raw IMR-based HDDs, this work, for the first time, moves one step forward to minimize the performance gap between IMR and CMR-based HDDs. Technically, by 1) fully utilizing two special CMR-like potentials of IMR and 2) gracefully trading the sequential access performance as space usage increases, MAGIC minimizes track rewriting overheads to achieve CMR-like performance. Our results reveal that MAGIC not only improves the write performance compared with existing designs, but also has potential to approach read and write performance of CMR-based HDD.