Streaming Media From Flash With Less Power Consumption

Reducing energy consumption has been an important design issue for large-scale streaming media storage systems. Existing energy conservation techniques are inadequate to achieve high energy efficiency for streaming media computing environments due to media is streamed from the hard disk drive. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a new energy-efficient method stream media from flash memory. Streaming media from flash memory significantly reduces power utilization because of two reasons. First, a set of hard disks in media server side consumes more power compared to flash memory. Second, heat dissipation on the media server side. Therefore Streaming media from the flash memory is conducive to saving more energy for the long media data. This approach is achieved using the kernel and device driver concepts on the Linux operating system. Our experimental results show that it can save up to 28.13%-29.33% energy consumption. Energy efficiency of streaming media storage systems can be improved by 3.3~6.0 times.