Data allocation in MEMS-based mobile storage devices

MEMS-based storage is being developed as a new storage media. Due to its attractive features such as small size, shock resistance, and low-power consumption, MEMS-based storage is anticipated to be widely used for mobile consumer electronics. However, MEMS-based storage has vastly different physical characteristics compared to a traditional disk. First, MEMS storage has thousands of heads that can be activated simultaneously. Second, the media of MEMS storage is a square structure which is different from the platter structure of disks. Third, the size of a physical sector in MEMS storage is an order of magnitude different from that of a conventional disk. This paper presents a new data allocation scheme for MEMS storage that makes use of the aforementioned characteristics. This new scheme considers the parallelism of MEMS storage as well as the seek time of requests on the two dimensional square structure. Simulation studies show that the proposed scheme improves the performance of MEMS storage significantly by exploiting the high parallelism of MEMS storage.