Changhee Han  Junhee Ryu  Dongeun Lee  Kyungtae Kang  Heonshik Shin

hybrid disk SSD caching storage tiering application launch time

Application launch time is an important performance metric to user experience in desktop and laptop environment, which mostly depends on the performance of secondary storage. Application launch times can be reduced by utilizing solid-state drive (SSD) instead of hard disk drive (HDD). However, considering a cost-performance trade-off, utilizing SSDs as caches for slow HDDs is a practicable alternative in reducing the application launch times. We propose a new SSD caching scheme which migrates data blocks from HDDs to SSDs. Our scheme operates entirely in the file system level and does not require an extra layer for mapping SSD-cached data that is essential in most other schemes. In particular, our scheme does not incur mapping overheads that cause significant burdens on the main memory, CPU, and SSD space for mapping table. Experimental results conducted with 8 popular applications demonstrate our scheme yields 56% of performance gain in application launch, when data blocks along with metadata are migrated.