Balloon: An Elastic Data Management Strategy for Interlaced Magnetic Recording

Recently, the emerging technology known as Interlaced Magnetic Recording (IMR) has been receiving widespread attention from both industry and academia. IMR-based disks incorporate interlaced track layouts and energy-assisted techniques to dramatically increase areal densities. The interlaced track layout means that in-place updates to the bottom track require rewriting the adjacent top track to ensure data consistency. However, at high disk utilization, frequent track rewrites degrade disk performance. To address this problem, we propose a solution called Balloon to reduce the frequency of track rewrites. First, an adaptive write interference data placement policy is introduced, which judiciously places data on tracks with low rewrite probability to avoid unnecessary rewrites. Next, an on-demand data shuffling mechanism is designed to reduce user-requests write latency by implicitly migrating data and promptly swapping tracks with high update block coverage to the top track. Finally, a write-interference-free persistent buffer design is proposed. This design dynamically adjusts buffer admission constraints and selectively evicts data blocks to improve the cooperation between data placement and data shuffling. Evaluation results show that Balloon significantly improves the write performance of IMR-based disks at medium and high utilization compared with state-of-the-art studies.