Hard disk drive performance characteristics
Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics.[1][2] These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: access time and data transfer time (or rate).[3]
Access time
The access time or response time of a rotating drive is a measure of the time it takes before the drive can actually
The key components that are typically added together to obtain the access time are:[2][5]
Seek time
With rotating drives, the seek time measures the time it takes the head assembly on the actuator arm to travel to the track of the disk where the data will be read or written.
A rotating drive's average seek time is the average of all possible seek times which technically is the time to do all possible seeks divided by the number of all possible seeks, but in practice it is determined by statistical methods or simply approximated as the time of a seek over one-third of the number of tracks.[5][7][10]
Seek times & characteristics
The first HDD[11] had an average seek time of about 600 ms.[12] and by the middle 1970s, HDDs were available with seek times of about 25 ms.[13] Some early PC drives used a stepper motor to move the heads, and as a result had seek times as slow as 80–120 ms, but this was quickly improved by voice coil type actuation in the 1980s, reducing seek times to around 20 ms. Seek time has continued to improve slowly over time.
The fastest high-end server drives today have a seek time around 4 ms.[14] Some mobile devices have 15 ms drives, with the most common mobile drives at about 12 ms[15] and the most common desktop drives typically being around 9 ms.
Two other less commonly referenced seek measurements are track-to-track and full stroke. The track-to-track measurement is the time required to move from one track to an adjacent track.[5] This is the shortest (fastest) possible seek time. In HDDs this is typically between 0.2 and 0.8 ms.[16] The full stroke measurement is the time required to move from the outermost track to the innermost track. This is the longest (slowest) possible seek time.[7]
Short stroking
Short stroking is a term used in enterprise storage environments to describe an HDD that is purposely restricted in total capacity so that the actuator only has to move the heads across a smaller number of total tracks.[17] This limits the maximum distance the heads can be from any point on the drive thereby reducing its average seek time, but also restricts the total capacity of the drive. This reduced seek time enables the HDD to increase the number of IOPS available from the drive. The cost and power per usable byte of storage rises as the maximum track range is reduced.[18][19]
Effect of audible noise and vibration control
Measured in
Some desktop- and laptop-class disk drives allow the user to make a trade-off between seek performance and drive noise. For example, Seagate offers a set of features in some drives called Sound Barrier Technology that include some user or system controlled noise and vibration reduction capability. Shorter seek times typically require more energy usage to quickly move the heads across the platter, causing loud noises from the pivot bearing and greater device vibrations as the heads are rapidly accelerated during the start of the seek motion and decelerated at the end of the seek motion. Quiet operation reduces movement speed and acceleration rates, but at a cost of reduced seek performance.[21]
Rotational latency
HDD spindle speed [rpm] |
Average rotational latency [ms] |
---|---|
4,200 | 7.14 |
5,400 | 5.56 |
7,200 | 4.17 |
10,000 | 3.00 |
15,000 | 2.00 |
Rotational latency (sometimes called rotational delay or just latency) is the delay waiting for the rotation of the disk to bring the required disk sector under the read-write head.[22] It depends on the rotational speed of a disk (or spindle motor), measured in revolutions per minute (RPM).[5][23] For most magnetic media-based drives, the average rotational latency is typically based on the empirical relation that the average latency in milliseconds for such a drive is one-half the rotational period. Maximum rotational latency is the time it takes to do a full rotation excluding any spin-up time (as the relevant part of the disk may have just passed the head when the request arrived).[24]
- Maximum latency = 60/rpm
- Average latency = 0.5*Maximum latency
Therefore, the rotational latency and resulting access time can be improved (decreased) by increasing the rotational speed of the disks.[5] This also has the benefit of improving (increasing) the throughput (discussed later in this article).
The spindle motor speed can use one of two types of disk rotation methods: 1)
Another wrinkle occurs depending on whether surface bit densities are constant. Usually, with a CAV spin rate, the densities are not constant so that the long outside tracks have the same number of bits as the shorter inside tracks. When the bit density is constant, outside tracks have more bits than inside tracks and is generally combined with a CLV spin rate. In both these schemes contiguous bit transfer rates are constant. This is not the case with other schemes such as using constant bit density with a CAV spin rate.
Effect of reduced power consumption
Other
The command processing time or command overhead is the time it takes for the drive electronics to set up the necessary communication between the various components in the device so it can read or write the data. This is of the order of 3 μs, very much less than other overhead times, so it is usually ignored when benchmarking hardware.[2][27]
The settle time is the time it takes the heads to settle on the target track and stop vibrating so they do not read or write off track. This time is usually very small, typically less than 100 μs, and modern HDD manufacturers account for it in their seek time specifications.[28]
Data transfer rate
The data transfer rate of a drive (also called throughput) covers both the internal rate (moving data between the disk surface and the controller on the drive) and the external rate (moving data between the controller on the drive and the host system). The measurable data transfer rate will be the lower (slower) of the two rates. The sustained data transfer rate or sustained throughput of a drive will be the lower of the sustained internal and sustained external rates. The sustained rate is less than or equal to the maximum or burst rate because it does not have the benefit of any cache or buffer memory in the drive. The internal rate is further determined by the media rate, sector overhead time, head switch time, and cylinder switch time.[5][29]
- Media rate
- Rate at which the drive can read bits from the surface of the media.
- Sector overhead time
- Additional time (bytes between sectors) needed for control structures and other information necessary to manage the drive, locate and validate data and perform other support functions.[30]
- Head switch time
- Additional time required to electrically switch from one head to another, re-align the head with the track and begin reading; only applies to multi-head drive and is about 1 to 2 ms.[30]
- Cylinder switch time
- Additional time required to move to the first track of the next cylinder and begin reading; the name cylinder is used because typically all the tracks of a drive with more than one head or data surface are read before moving the actuator. This time is typically about twice the track-to-track seek time. As of 2001, it was about 2 to 3 ms.[31]
Data transfer rate (read/write) can be measured by writing a large file to disk using special file generator tools, then reading back the file.
- According to vendor specifications sustained transfer rates up to 204 MB/s are available.[32] As of 2010[update], a typical 7,200 RPM desktop HDD has a "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1030 Mbit/s.[33] This rate depends on the track location, so it will be higher on the outer zones (where there are more data sectors per track) and lower on the inner zones (where there are fewer data sectors per track); and is generally somewhat higher for 10,000 RPM drives.
- Floppy disk drives have sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rates that are one or two orders of magnitude lower than that of HDDs.
- The sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rates varies amongst families of Optical disk drives with the slowest 1x CDs at 1.23 Mbit/s floppy-like while a high performance 12x Blu-ray drive at 432 Mbit/s approaches the performance of HDDs.
A current widely used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which can send about 300 megabyte/s (10-bit encoding) from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates.
SSDs do not have the same internal limits of HDDs, so their internal and external transfer rates are often maximizing the capabilities of the drive-to-host interface.
Effect of file system
Transfer rate can be influenced by file system fragmentation and the layout of the files. Defragmentation is a procedure used to minimize delay in retrieving data by moving related items to physically proximate areas on the disk.[34] Some computer operating systems perform defragmentation automatically. Although automatic defragmentation is intended to reduce access delays, the procedure can slow response when performed while the computer is in use.[35]
Effect of areal density
HDD data transfer rate depends upon the rotational speed of the disks and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed, increasing density has become the main method to improve sequential transfer rates.
Interleave
Sector interleave is a mostly obsolete device characteristic related to data rate, dating back to when computers were too slow to be able to read large continuous streams of data. Interleaving introduced gaps between data sectors to allow time for slow equipment to get ready to read the next block of data. Without interleaving, the next logical sector would arrive at the read/write head before the equipment was ready, requiring the system to wait for another complete disk revolution before reading could be performed.
However, because interleaving introduces intentional physical delays between blocks of data thereby lowering the data rate, setting the interleave to a ratio higher than required causes unnecessary delays for equipment that has the performance needed to read sectors more quickly. The interleaving ratio was therefore usually chosen by the end-user to suit their particular computer system's performance capabilities when the drive was first installed in their system.
Modern technology is capable of reading data as fast as it can be obtained from the spinning platters, so interleaving is no longer used.
Power consumption
Drives use more power, briefly, when starting up (spin-up). Although this has little direct effect on total energy consumption, the maximum power demanded from the power supply, and hence its required rating, can be reduced in systems with several drives by controlling when they spin up.
- On SCSI hard disk drives, the SCSI controller can directly control spin up and spin down of the drives.
- Some Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives support power-up in standby(PUIS): each drive does not spin up until the controller or system BIOS issues a specific command to do so. This allows the system to be set up to stagger disk start-up and limit maximum power demand at switch-on.
- Some SATA II and later hard disk drives support staggered spin-up, allowing the computer to spin up the drives in sequence to reduce load on the power supply when booting.[44]
Most hard disk drives today support some form of power management which uses a number of specific power modes that save energy by reducing performance. When implemented an HDD will change between a full power mode to one or more power saving modes as a function of drive usage. Recovery from the deepest mode, typically called Sleep, may take as long as several seconds.[45]
Shock resistance
Shock resistance is especially important for mobile devices. Some laptops now include
SMR drives
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2020) |
Hard drives that use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) differ significantly in write performance characteristics from conventional (CMR) drives. In particular, sustained random writes are significantly slower on SMR drives.[47] As SMR technology causes a degradation on write performance, some new HDD with Hybrid SMR technology (making it possible to adjust the ratio of SMR part and CMR part dynamically) may have various characteristics under different SMR/CMR ratios.[48]
Comparison to solid-state drives
Measurement of seek time is only testing electronic circuits preparing a particular location on the memory in the storage device. Typical SSDs will have a seek time between 0.08 and 0.16 ms.[16]
Flash memory-based SSDs do not need defragmentation. However, because file systems
See also
References
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