EECS Publication
SD Codes: Erasure Codes Designed for How Storage Systems Really Fail
James S. Plank, Mario Blaum, and James L. Hafner
Traditionally, when storage systems employ erasure codes, they are designed to tolerate the failures of entire disks. However, the most common types of failures are latent sector failures, which only affect individual disk sectors, and block failures which arise through wear on SSD's. This paper introduces SD codes, which are designed to tolerate combinations of disk and sector failures. As such, they consume far less storage resources than traditional erasure codes. We specify the codes with enough detail for the storage practitioner to employ them, discuss their practical properties, and detail an open-source implementation.
Published 2012-11-06 05:00:00 as ut-cs-12-701 (ID:13)