Feasibility Regions: Exploiting Tradeoffs Between Power and Performance in Disk Drives

Low utilization immediately suggests that placing the system into a low power mode during idle times may considerably decrease power consumption. As future workload remains largely unknown, "When" to initiate a power saving mode and for "How long" to stay in this mode remains a challenging open problem, given that performance degradation of future jobs should not be compromised. The authors present a model and an algorithm that manages to successfully explore feasible regions of power and performance, and expose the system limitations according to both measures.