Improving RAID performance using a multibuffer technique

RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) offers high performance for read accesses and large writes to many consecutive blocks. On small writes, however, it entails large penalties. Two approaches have been proposed to address this problem. The first approach records the update information on a separate log disk, and only brings the affected parity blocks to the consistent state when the system is idle. This strategy increases the chance of disk failure due to the additional log disks. Furthermore, heavy system loads for an extended period of time can overflow the log disks and cause sudden disastrous performance. The second approach avoids the above problems by grouping the updated blocks into new stripes and writing them as large writes. Unfortunately, this strategy improves write performance on the expense of read operations. After many updates, a set of logically consecutive data blocks can migrate to only a few disks making fetching them more expensive. We improve on the second approach by eliminating its negative side effects. Our simulation results indicate that the existing scheme sometime performs worse than the standard RAIDS design. Our method is consistently better than either of these techniques