Striping Policy as a Design Parameter for MEMS-based Storage Systems

Storage devices based on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) are suitable as secondary storage for future (mobile) computer systems. They are non-volatile and execute a high level of parallelism. In a MEMS-based storage system, many (i.e., 100s or 1000s) read/write heads or probes operate simultaneously. Due to this parallelism, MEMS-based storage systems face a design challenge: how should a data block be striped across the active probes, called the striping policy? In this paper, we discuss how the striping policy, as a design parameter, impacts two key characteristics of MEMS-based storage system in opposite ways. These characteristics are the service time and effective capacity. As these objectives are conflicting, there is no optimal design but a variety of design choices represented as trade-offs. We show a dependency on the workload of the trade-off.