# 3 Power consumption of large EIDE disk drives.

Working with Arrays of Inexpensive EIDE Disk Drives

(Including an Appendix with a December 1999 Update)

David Sanders, Chris Riley, Lucien Cremaldi, and Don Summers

University of Mississippi–Oxford

Don Petravick

Fermilab

Abstract:

In today’s marketplace, the cost per Terabyte of disks with EIDE interfaces is about a third that of disks with SCSI. Hence, three times as many particle physics events could be put online with EIDE. The modern EIDE interface includes many of the performance features that appeared earlier in SCSI. EIDE bus speeds approach 33 Megabytes/s and need only be shared between two disks rather than seven disks. The internal I/O rate of very fast (and expensive) SCSI disks is only 50 per cent greater than EIDE disks. Hence, two EIDE disks whose combined cost is much less than one very fast SCSI disk can actually give more data throughput due to the advantage of multiple spindles and head actuators. We explore the use of 12 and 16 Gigabyte EIDE disks with motherboard and PCI bus card interfaces on a number of operating systems and CPUs. These include Red Hat Linux and Windows 95/98 on a Pentium, MacOS and Apple’s Rhapsody/NeXT/UNIX on a PowerPC, and Sun Solaris on a UltraSparc 10 workstation.

Computing in High Energy Physics Conference (CHEP ’98)

August 31 – September 4, 1998

Hotel Inter–Continental

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Contact: sanders@relativity.phy.olemiss.edu

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under

grant DE-FG02-91ER40622 and contract DE-AC02-76CH03000.

Introduction

In today’s marketplace, the cost per Terabyte of disks with EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics) interfaces is about a third that of disks with SCSI (Small Computer System Interface). Hence, three times as many particle physics events could be put online with EIDE. The modern EIDE interface includes many of the performance features that appeared earlier in SCSI. EIDE bus speeds approach 33 Megabytes/s and need only be shared between two EIDE disks rather than seven SCSI disks. The internal I/O rate of very fast (and expensive) SCSI disks is only 50 percent greater than EIDE disks. Direct Memory Access (DMA), scatter/gather data transfers without intervention of the Central Processor Unit (CPU), elevator seeks, and command queuing are now available for EIDE, as well as support for disks larger than 8.4 Gigabytes. PCI (Peripheral Control Interface) cards allow the addition of even more EIDE interfaces, in addition to those already on the motherboard.

Motivation

There are a number of High Energy Physics Experiments that have produced Terabytes of data . A few examples as of 12/95 are:

The efficiency of data analysis is greatly enhanced by using disk based files of filtered Data Summary Tapes (DSTs) rather than continually loading files from tapes. However, the high cost of disks have hindered more widespread use. Low cost EIDE disks are improving this situation.

Big Disks

Tests Performed

For this paper we tested two of the large capacity EIDE disks with six different operating systems and a PCI EIDE disk controller card. The six operating systems are Mac OS 8.1, Apple Rhapsody DR2, Sun Solaris 2.6, Windows 95b, Windows 98, and RedHat LINUX 5.1 (kernel 2.0.34). The two disk drives and the disk controller card are described below:

* Quantum Bigfoot<sup>TM</sup> TX  12 GB, 4000 RPM, 142 Mbits/sec Maximum internal data rate, 12 ms average seek time.
* The IBM Deskstar<sup>TM</sup> 16GP . 16.8 GB, 5400 RPM, 162 Mbits/sec Maximum internal data rate, 9.5 ms average seek time.
* Promise Technologies Ultra 33<sup>TM</sup> PCI EIDE controller card . Supports 4 drives, Ultra ATA/EIDE/Fast ATA-2. Cost: $50.

Both the Quantum Bigfoot<sup>TM</sup> TX 12 GB and the IBM Deskstar<sup>TM</sup> 16GP 16 GB disks were successfully tested with the following systems:

Ten Terabyte EIDE Disk Architecture

The recipe for a simple 10 Terabyte EIDE Disk Architecture is as follows:

* Attach eight 16GB EIDE disks to each of 75 CPUs with the help of Promise PCI controller cards.
* Since EIDE cables have a maximum length of 18”, it is easier to run extra DC power cables into a computer tower than to run EIDE cables out.
* Load data on these disk arrays.
* Plan to usually run analysis jobs on the same machine as the data.
* Use fast Ethernet switches to allow for remote jobs at a modest level.

Future

Future plans may include testing the drives with Apple Rhapsody, Sun Solaris, and newer releases of Red Hat LINUX. (The 8 GB limit seen so far on Rhapsody DR2 and Solaris 2.6 may be fixed in later releases.) Also new technologies that are worth investigating include both “Lazy RAID” and Firewire<sup>TM</sup>. 

Lazy RAID

Lazy RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is an idea for using disk arrays that offers protection for disks in the event of catastrophic failure of one disk in the array. This system uses a number of data disks (say 7) plus one parity disk. Therefore, if one disk dies the parity disk would allow the recovery of data from the dead disk. One could use the RAW DEVICE interface to calculate parity with the CPU. If a disk fails then the operator would swap out the dead EIDE drive and reconstitute the dead disk drive onto the replacement drive using the parity disk and the remaining data disks. This system is well suited for use as scratch disks where a filtered DST is placed on disk once and read and analyzed many times. Using this scheme the one parity disk is updated only when a file is written to (or erased from) a disk.

Firewire

Firewire IEEE 1394 Specifications :

* Up to 25 or 50 Megabyte/s.
* Up to 63 devices per interface.
* Uses two twisted pair data lines.
* “Fairness” bus arbitration.
* Supported by MacOS and Windows 98.

A printed circuit board and DSP driver software would have to be developed using the TI chip set . Shown below is a Firewire to EIDE Disk Block Diagram that might allow one Terabyte Per PCI Slot:

Conclusion

EIDE disk arrays are an inexpensive way to add large amounts of disk space to both single Workstations (and PCs) and multiprocessor computing farms. They provide an additional layer to the data storage “cake”.

1. S. Bracker, K. Gounder, K. Hendrix, and D. Summers, A Simple Multiprocessor Management System for Event-Parallel Computing, IEEE NS-43 (1996) 2457.
2. http://www.quantum.com/products/hdd/bigfoot\_tx/
3. http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/desk/1614data.htm
4. http://www.promise.com/html/sales/Ultra33.html
5. http://www.apple.com/powermac/g3/
6. http://www.dell.com/products/dim/xpsr/specs/index.htm
7. http://www.skipstone.com/info.html
8. http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/news/1998/98029.htm; http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/dsps/details/43/flash.htm; http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/msp/1394/41lv0x.htm; http://www.ti.com/sc/docs/storage/products/cont.htm

EIDE/ATA Disk Drive Update — December 1999

Costs of disk drives with EIDE/ATA interfaces  have fallen since the Chicago CHEP ’98 conference. Drive capacity and I/O rates have risen. EIDE/ATA disks beyond the old 8 Gigabyte limit now work with more platforms and cards. EIDE disks remain more than twice as cost effective as SCSI disks and now equal the internal I/O speeds of many SCSI disks. We have run RAID 5 on EIDE disks under Linux which both stripes data across disks for speed and provides parity bits for data recovery. Tape backup may no longer be required to recover from one disk failure in a set. Arrays of EIDE disks with Linux PCs serving as disk controllers are attractive and may provide many Terabytes of economical rotating online storage. The cost of a quarter Petabyte EIDE disk farm is approaching the cost of a StorageTek PowderHorn silo  with 5000 50 Gigabyte RedWood tapes. Finally, we include more information on IEEE–1394 FireWire which may allow Terabyte arrays of EIDE/ATA disks to be directly connected to one or more computers at up to 50 Megabytes/second per interface.

We now have our 12 GB Quantum Bigfoot TX  and 16.8 GB IBM Deskstar 16GP  EIDE drives running in our Sun Ultra 10 workstation. We put in a newer motherboard (Sun Part No. 375-0009-09, Date Code: 9843 DARWIN M/B) and upgraded the operating system from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7. We did not test the two changes individually, but one or both put us over the old 8 Gigabyte limit.

Promise Technology now sells their Ultra66  EIDE to PCI controller card. The Ultra66 provides up to 66 MB/s on each of two channels with two drives per channel. The card costs $40. We use Promise’s previous 33 MB/s EIDE to PCI card daily in our Linux PC server (mail, backup…) with IBM Deskstar disks .

ProMAX  sells a TurboMAX/ATA 33 Host Adapter for Macintosh PCI buses. It allows adding four EIDE drives to an Apple Macintosh. Disks can be striped in pairs. FirmTek  is working on an Apple Macintosh software driver for the Promise Ultra66 EIDE to PCI card.

Terabytes of Linux RAID 5 Disks

RAID  stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Many industry offering meet all of the qualifications except the inexpensive part, severely limiting the size of an array for a given budget. This may change. RAID on EIDE disks under Linux software which both stripes data across disks for speed and provides parity bits for data recovery (RAID 5) is now available . With redundant disk arrays, tape backup is not needed to recover from the failure of one disk in a set. This removes a major obstacle to building large arrays of EIDE disks. A RAID 5 set of eight 41 Gigabyte disks fits in a full tower case of a PC running Linux. This provides over a quarter of a Terabyte per box. The boxes would be connected using 100 Megabit/second Fast Ethernet PCI cards in each box plus Ethernet switches . This looks to be very doable.

We have done a quick test of the Linux RAID 5 software using two 25 Gigabyte IBM Deskstar 25GP  EIDE disks. The host was a Pentium II with Red Hat Linux 6.0  and a Promise Technology Ultra 33 EIDE/PCI card. The test ran as expected. Naturally, half the disk space is devoted to parity with only two disks. For a real RAID 5 system, eight or more disks would be a more efficient use of space. The fraction of disk space devoted to parity equals the inverse of the number of disks in a set.

On a mundane note, disk drives typically draw two amps at 12 volts for 15 seconds when starting. Thus eight drives can draw 16 amps at 12 volts. This can tax the ratings of an inexpensive commodity 300 watt PC power supply. Care needs to be taken to choose a supply with a large portion of its wattage devoted to 12 volts. The U.S. EPA Energy Star/Green PC Initiative has led to the development of a Standby command for disks that might allow a staggered startup of a disk array. The command “/sbin/hdparm -S n” will spin down disks under Linux. As array size grows, a second commodity 300 watt PC power supply might be required per case.

Comparison of Quarter Petabyte Disk and Tape Storage Systems

In Table 4, we compare a quarter Petabyte EIDE disk farm to an automated StorageTek PowderHorn tape silo  with eight RedWood tape drives and 5000 50 Gigabyte tapes. The disk farm estimate includes disks, parity disks, Linux and RAID software, CPUs, motherboards, cases , power supplies, memory, Fast Ethernet PCI cards, Promise Ultra66 cards, Ethernet switches , and racks. The Linux PC that runs each disk set costs about the same as a high end SCSI-to-PCI controller card.

To achieve a quarter Petabyte, 873 Linux PCs are required with eight 40.9 GB disks each. One eighth of the disk space is devoted to parity for data recovery from disk failure. Care must be taken to write protect files and disks to prevent accidental deletion. Physically, the PCs form a wall 4 high by 2 deep by 110 wide (2.4 $`\times `$ 1.1 $`\times `$ 24 meters). Each Linux PC consumes about 90 watts, equally divided between the disks and the CPU/motherboard. A dozen 24 000 BTU window air conditioners would suffice to remove this 80 Kilowatt heat load. Much less heat is generated in standby mode. The first level network consists of 288 $75 fast ethernet switches . A single high end switch with 288 fast ethernet ports is used for the network backbone . The disks themselves can be used to transport data between sites. A high rate experiment might generate a Terabyte of data a day which one wished to move. A Terabyte fits on 25 disks, which easily fit in a suitcase for shipping.

In summary, the disk farm cost is not too much greater than the tape silo cost and the performance of the disks is far better. One also gets a Teraflop of computing power  as a free bonus; and the disk farm encapsulates data with instructions in physical computing objects which can be exploited to increase efficiency. Disk farm sizes can be scaled in size with great flexibility! Its sometimes difficult for a university to buy a whole tape silo . Now everyone can have the benefit of online data.

Terabyte Arrays of IEEE–1394 FireWire Disks

The amount of disk space one can connect to a CPU directly with 18” EIDE cables is currently less than a Terabyte. In some applications, one might want to access more data with fast local disk and not suffer the overhead of network software. One may be able to use four IEEE–1394 FireWire buses  with a single CPU to attach up to 63 inexpensive EIDE disks per bus for a total of 10 Terabytes of local storage at 200 MB/s. FireWire’s peer–to–peer topology also adds significant new functionality by allowing multiple computers to share multiple disks directly on a single bus.

Symbios Logic/LSI Logic has a $13 IEEE–1394 to ATA/ATAPI controller chip . The SYM13FW500 integrates a 400 Mbits/s IEEE–1394 (FireWire) physical interface (PHY) with an ATA/ATAPI interface, all on a low–power CMOS IC. Each SYM13FW500 supports two ATA/ATAPI devices. Wyle Electronics distributes the part. Recently, Oxford Semiconductor has also introduced an IEEE–1394 to ATA/ATAPI controller chip, the OXFW900 . Texas Instruments has decided not to market their prototype IEEE–1394 to ATA/ATAPI chip.

EIDE disks with EIDE to IEEE 1394 FireWire interfaces are available from LaCie  and VST Technologies. VST Technologies has also shown FireWire RAID arrays with mirroring and striping, but not parity . All the disks are EIDE.

An interesting possibility might be to put eight EIDE drives in an inexpensive PC case with a 300 watt power supply. Then add four EIDE to FireWire interface chips to a circuit board with the same form factor as a PC motherboard. The color of the PC case can even be special ordered  for Apple Macintosh users.

Andreas Bombe, Sebastien Rougeaux, and Emanuel Pirker are in the process of writing GNU Linux software drivers for IEEE 1394/FireWire devices .

Pieces appear to be converging. It may, in the not too distant future, be possible to directly connect Terabyte arrays of EIDE/ATA disks to one or more computers at up to 50 Megabytes/second per FireWire interface. Some computers come with FireWire on the motherboard. FireWire interfaces can also be added with cards such as OrangeMicro’s HotLink FireWire PCI Board .

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