Power and performance characteristics of USB flash drives

Author

Brien, Kyle O. ; Salyers, David C. ; Striegel, Aaron D. ; Poellabauer, Christian

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Univ. of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN

fYear

2008

fDate

23-26 June 2008

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

Even though their capacities are still orders of magnitude lower than those of hard disks, flash storage systems are rapidly gaining importance in energy-constrained systems. This paper focuses on USB flash drives, which can provide portable storage to mobile systems or storage to systems that otherwise do not have persistent storage opportunities (e.g., low-power sensor devices). The paper presents studies relating to power consumption, energy overheads and benefits, and performance impacts of USB flash drives. The key insights obtained from these experiments are that (i) read/write costs are not significantly greater than idle costs and (ii) the size of the flash itself has only limited bearing on energy consumption.

Keywords

flash memories; performance evaluation; USB flash drives; energy consumption; flash storage systems; performance characteristics; power characteristics; Costs; Drives; Energy consumption; Energy storage; Hard disks; Linux; Operating systems; Sensor systems; Universal Serial Bus; Wireless sensor networks;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks, 2008. WoWMoM 2008. 2008 International Symposium on a

Conference_Location

Newport Beach, CA

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2099-5

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-2100-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WOWMOM.2008.4594868

Filename

4594868