A New Approach to the Design of High Performance Multiple Disk Subsystems: Dynamic Load Balancing Schemes

The performance of storage subsystems has not followed therapid improvements in processors technology, despite the increased capacityand density in storage medium. Here, we introduce a new modelbased on the idea of enhancing the I/O subsystem controller capabilitiesby dynamic load balancing on a storage subsystem of multiple disk drives.The request servicing is modified such that each request is directed to themost appropriate disk drive towards servicing performance improvement.The redirection is performed by a proposed algorithm which considersthe disk drive queues and the disk drives “popularity”. The proposed requestservicing has been simulated and the load balancing approach hasbeen shown quite effective as compared to conventional request servicing.