Disk Drive Performance

Electromechanical device
Impacts the overall performance of the storage system

Disk Service Time

Time taken by a disk to complete an I/O request
Seek Time Rotational Latency

Data Transfer Rate

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Storage System Environment - 1

Disk Drive Performance: Seek Time

Time taken to position the read/write head Lower the seek time, the faster the I/O operation Seek time specifications include:
Full stroke Average Track-to-track

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Storage System Environment - 2

Disk Drive Performance: Rotational Speed/Latency

The time taken by platter to rotate and position the data under the R/W head

Depends on the rotation speed of the spindle

Average rotational latency
One-half of the time taken for a full rotation Appx. 5.5 ms for 5400-rpm drive Appx. 2.0 ms for 15000-rpm drive

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Storage System Environment - 3

Disk Drive Performance: Data Transfer Rate

Average amount of data per unit time Internal Transfer Rate
Speed at which data moves from a track to disk internal buffer

External Transfer Rate

The advertised speed of the interface
External transfer rate measured here
Internal transfer rate measured here

HBA

Interface

Buffer

Head Disk Assembly

Disk Drive
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Fundamental Laws Governing Disk Performance

Littles Law
Describes the relationship between the number of requests in a queue and the response time. N=aR
N is the total number of requests in the system a is the arrival rate R is the average response time

Utilization law
Defines the I/O controller utilization U = a RS
U is the I/O controller utilization RS is the service time
I/O Queue Arrival I/O Controller

Processed I/O Request

2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

Storage System Environment - 5

Utilization vs. Response time

Knee of curve: disks at about 70% utilization

Low Queue Size

0%

Utilization

70%

100%

Consider a disk I/O system in which an I/O request arrives at a rate of 100 I/Os per second. The service time, RS, is 4 ms.
Utilization of I/O controller (U=a Rs) Total response time (R=Rs /1-U)

Calculate the same with service time is doubled

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Lesson Summary
Key points covered in this lesson: Disk drive components and geometry

Disk drive addressing scheme

Disk drive performance Convention drive Vs Enterprise Flash Drives Enterprise Flash Drives for high performance and low power storage solution

2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

Storage System Environment - 7

Application Requirements and Disk Performance

Exercise: Consider an application that requires 1TB of storage capacity and performs 4900 IOPS
Application I/O size is 4KB As it is business critical application, response time must be within acceptable range

Specification of available disk drive:

Drive capacity = 73 GB
15000 RPM 5 ms average seek time 40 MB/sec transfer rate

Calculate the number of disks required?

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Solution
Calculate time required to perform one I/O
Seek time + (rotational delay)/speed in RPM + (block size/transfer rate)

Therefore, 5 ms + 0.5 /15000 + 4K/40MB = 7.1 msec

Calculate max. number of IOPS a disk can perform

1 / 7.1 ms = 140 IOPS

For acceptable response time disk controller utilization must be less than 70%
Therefore, 140 X 0.7 = 98 IOPS

To meet application
Performance requirement we need 4900/98 i.e. 50 disk Capacity requirement we need 1TB/ 73 GB i.e. 14 disk
Disk required = max (capacity, performance)
2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Storage System Environment - 9

Module Summary
Key points covered in this module: Storage system environment components:
Host, connectivity and storage

Physical disk structure and addressing Factors affecting disk performance Flash drives benefits

2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.

Storage System Environment - 10

 Check Your Knowledge

What are some examples of hosts? What are the physical and logical components of a host?

What are the common connectivity protocols used in computing environments?

What is the difference between seek time and rotational latency? What is the difference between internal and external data transfer rates?

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Storage System Environment - 11