Automated disk drive characterization (poster session)

DIXtrac is a program that automatically characterizes the performance of modern disk drives. This extended abstract overviews the contents of [3], which describes and validates DIXtrac's algorithms for extracting accurate values for over 100 performance-critical parameters in 2-6 minutes without human intervention or special hardware support. The extracted data includes detailed layout and geometry information, mechanical timings, cache management policies, and command processing overheads. DIXtrac is validated by configuring a detailed disk simulator with its extracted parameters; in most cases, the resulting accuracies match those of the most accurate disk simulators reported in the literature. To date, DIXtrac has been successfully used on ten different models from four different manufacturers. A growing database of validated disk characteristics is available in DiskSim [1] format at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/disksim/diskspecs.html.