Architecture Exploration of High-Performance PCs with a Solid-State Disk

—As the cost per bit of NAND flash memory devices rapidly decreases, NAND-flash-based Solid-State Disks (SSDs) are replacing Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) used in a wide spectrum of consumer computing devices. Although typical SSDs can deliver higher performances than HDDs can, the full capabilities of SSDs are currently not exploited in most systems. This is because an SSD is interfaced with its host system using the architectures and interface protocols designed for HDDs, due to compatibility issues. Given the pace at which the stand-alone performance of SSDs improves, the performance loss of SSDs due to the legacy interface and system architecture will soon become intolerable. To address this issue, we propose several architectural choices to fully exploit the performance of SSDs used in consumer PC architectures. More specifically, we explore its interface scheme, and data transfer concurrency with the change of the conventional PC architecture if necessary. We evaluated the performanc...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TC
• Authors: Dong Kim, Kwanhu Bang, Seung-Hwan Ha, Sungroh Yoon, Eui-Young Chung
• Keywords: Architecture, Information Technology, Performance, SSDs, TC 2010