Simulation for a Shingled Magnetic Recording Disk

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a new technology based on partially overlapping, or shingling, adjacent tracks, which is capable of increasing the density of a disk drive up to 10 ${\hbox {Tb\it/\in}}^{2}$ . To write data on overlapping tracks may erase data being written previously. Therefore, without any data translation layer to redirect updates to different locations to avoid unintended data erasures, the SMR disk cannot be used as a conventional disk to perform unrestricted reads/writes directly. Various data translation/mapping strategies have been proposed to allow the disk to perform unrestricted reads/writes. However, these strategies have tradeoffs in terms of system performance and cost, such as disk space utilization. Nevertheless, system performance varies for different applications and under different workload conditions.