FAXtrac: Fast Extraction of Disk Layout

The low-level disk characteristics play a vital role for the I/O performance optimization in disk storage systems. This paper presents FAXtrac, a tool for automatically and efficiently extracting the exact disk layout, i.e., the number of sectors of each disk track. FAXtrac includes three algorithms, namely SptExplore, TrackExplore, and RemoveNoise, to ensure the correctness and speediness of the extraction of disk layout. We tested FAXtrac on a number of different disk models. It took only 75 minutes to extract the detailed disk layout for a 250 GB SATA disk, which shortened the time by two orders of magnitude as compared with an existing solution. We believe that FAXtrac is a valuable tool for the hard disk storage research community.