A hybrid storage technology for low power consumption and high I/O performance in an IPTV set-top box

A new method of prefetching data blocks from the NVCache to the page cache in main memory and cascading prefetching n-blocks from a hard disk to the NVCache together was proposed to reduce the spin-up frequency of a hybrid hard disk drive and thus enhance I/O performance. The proposed method consists of three steps: 1) Analyzing the pattern of read requests in block units; 2) Determining the number of blocks prefetched to the NVCache; 3) Replacing blocks in the NVCache according to the block replacement policy. The proposed method can reduce the latency time of a hybrid hard disk and optimize the power consumption of an IPTV set-top box. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides better average response time compared to an existing adaptive multistream prefetching (AMP) method by 25.17%. It also reduces by 20.83% the average power consumption over that of the existing external caching in energy saving storage system (EXCES) method.