Increasing hard drive performance - from a thermal perspective

Abstract

The importance of input/output (I/O) performance, hard disks in particular grows over the years. Speed and performance of semiconductor components have grown rapidly and the hard disk I/O sub system cannot cope with that rate. Many have attempted to remove this I/O bottleneck using several techniques such as better cache management, parallelism in the form of RAID, high bandwidth interconnections such as SAN, improved read/write head designs and improved cooling systems. Most of them had not considered the fundamental factor affecting the I/O performance; heat generated within the disk drive from the read/write process. This paper presents a method to increase the hard disk I/O performance by operating the hard drives in a vendor recommended temperature range. Operating the hard drives in the safe temperature range would not only provide performance improvements, it also provide more reliable disk drives by eliminating the off track errors and head crashes. To achieve the above mentioned performance increase, this paper suggests a disk drive model which would work according to the variations of the temperature of the disk drive model.