• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.101-112
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• 2007

Hard disks have been the most prevalent secondary storage devices and these days their usage is becoming more important in mobile computing systems due to I/O intensive applications such as multimedia applications and games. However, significant power consumption in the disk drives still limits battery lifetimes of mobile systems critically. In this paper, we show that using several smaller disks (instead of one large disk) can be an energy-efficient secondary storage solution on typical mobile platforms without a significant performance delay. Also, we propose a novel energy-efficient technique, which clusters related data into groups and migrates the correlated groups to the same disk. We compare this method with the existing data concentration scheme, and also combine them. The experiments show that our technique saves the energy consumption up to 34% when a pair of 1.8' disks is used instead of a single 2.5' disk with a negligible increase in the average response time. The results also show that our method also saves up to 14.8% of disk energy consumption and improve the average I/O response time by up to 10 times over the existing scheme.