Proceedings of the ACM Sigmetrics Conference, May 1995.

On­Line Extraction of SCSI Disk Drive Parameters

Bruce L. Worthington, Gregory R. Ganger, Yale N. Patt, John Wilkes*

Dept. of EECS, Univ. of Michigan
* Hewlett­Packard Laboratories

Abstract

Sophisticated disk scheduling algorithms require accuate, detailed disk drive specifications, including data about mechanical delays, on­board caching and prefetching algorithms, command and protocol overheads, and logical­to­physical block mappings. Comprehensive disk models used in storage subsystem design require similar levels of detail. We describe a suite of general­purpose algorithms and techniques for acquiring the necessary information from a SCSI disk drive. Using only the ANSI­standard interface, we demonstrate how the important parameter values of a modern SCSI drive can be determined accurately and efficiently.

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