maid · research · also MAID, massive arrays of idle disks

Massive array of idle disks

A massive array of idle disks is a storage architecture that keeps selected disks spun down between accesses to reduce energy use.

Related Observatory article: Massive array of idle disks on hesela.com

Placement, idle timers and caching determine which drives must wake for a request [1]. A nearline HDD product class does not imply this power policy [2].

Relations

related: nearline-hdd, power-aware-coding, cold-archive, erasure-coding

Citations

Colarelli and Grunwald: Massive Arrays of Idle Disks For Storage Archives (SC 2002), sections 2-5. (accessed 2026-10-17)
IBM technical blog: The Correct Use of the term Nearline. (accessed 2026-10-17)

Sources & caveats

Colarelli and Grunwald (2002) evaluated trace-driven simulation, not a production energy survey. [1]

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