Data Handling Algorithms For Autonomous Shingled Magnetic Recording HDDs

The acceptance of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives in the marketplace depends in part upon their system performance with the operational constraints demanded by SMR's wide writing heads. Current thinking suggests that SMR may require significant changes to the host file system because of SMR's natural proclivity for sequential writing, and supposed difficulty with random write operations. In this work, we propose a data handling algorithm which exhibits good short-block sustained random write performance. In addition, we examine optimal algorithms for intermediate transfer lengths on the order of one physical track in length.