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CMU-CS-99-176
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
CMU-CS-99-176
Automated Disk Drive Characterization
Jiri Schindler, Gregory R. Ganger
December 1999
CMU-CS-99-176.ps
CMU-CS-99-176.pdf
Keywords:
DIXtrac is a program that automatically characterizes the performance of
modern drives. This report describes and validates DIXtrac's algorithms,
which extract accurate values for over 100 performance-critical parameters
in 2-6 minutes without human interventin or special hardware support.
The extracted data include detailed layout and geometry information,
mechanical timings, cache management policies, and command processing
overheads. DIXtrac is valided 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 over 20 disk drives,
including eight different models from four different manufacturers.
22 pages
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