A performance-oriented energy efficient file system

Current general-purpose file systems emphasize the consistency of standard file system semantics and performance issues rather than energy-efficiency. In this paper we present a novel energy efficient file system called EEFS to effectively both reduce energy consumption and improve performance by separately managing those small-sized files with a good group access locality. To keep compatibility, EEFS consists of two working modules: a normal Unix-like File System (UFS) and a group-structured file system (GFS) that are transparent to user applications. EEFS contributes a new grouping policy that can construct files groups with group access locality and be used to migrate files between UFS and GFS. Comprehensive trace-driven simulation experiments show that EEFS achieves a great energy savings by up to 50% compared to that of the general-purpose UNIX file system, and simultaneously delivers a better file I/O performance by up to 21%.