Trail: a track-based logging disk architecture for zero-overhead writes

A novel disk architecture called Trail is proposed to optimize the disk write latency without sacrificing the disk read performance. This architecture features a track-based logging technique, which essentially reduces a disk write latency to the transfer delay. In addition, this disk architecture allows concurrent read/write, and implicit write scheduling without compromising data integrity. Through a synthetic-trace simulation study, we have shown that for transaction processing workloads, the write latency improvement of Trail over conventional disk devices is at least an order of magnitude. Trail´s read latency performance is also better in all cases, sometimes the improvement is also over an order of magnitude. In terms of disk bandwidth utilization, the Trail architecture has a close to 100% write bandwidth efficiency and a read bandwidth efficiency at least as good as a conventional disk