A Reconfigurable Virtual Storage Device

This research is motivated by the demands of personalized storage devices that fit the quality-of-service needs of each individual user. In particular, the design of a virtual storage device, that consists of multiple heterogeneous storage devices, is proposed with the capability in dynamic reconfiguration to fit the needs of users. A dynamic remapping mechanism is presented with a heap-based data structure to manage the moving of data among component storage devices for performance optimization. A lazy swapping method is then proposed to reduce the mapping overheads. The capability of the proposed design is evaluated with a prototype virtual storage device of a flash drive and a hard drive over an ex2 file system and realistic/generated workloads.