Self-sorting SSD: Producing sorted data inside active SSDs

—Nowadays solid state drives (SSDs) are gaining popularity and are replacing magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) in enterprise storage systems. As a result, extracting the maximum performance from SSDs is becoming crucial to deal with the increasing storage volume and performance needs. Active disks were introduced as a way to offload data-processing tasks from the host into disks freeing system resources and achieving better performance. In this work, we present an active SSD architecture called SelfSorting SSD that targets to offload sorting operations which are commonly used in data-intensive and database environments and that require heavy data transfer. Processing sorting operations directly on the SSD reduces data transfer from/to the storage devices, increasing system performance and the lifetime of SSDs. Experiments on a real SSD platform reveal that our proposed architecture outperforms traditional external merge sort by up to 60.75%, reduces energy consumption by up to 58.86...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MSS
• Authors: Luis Cavazos Quero, Young-Sik Lee, Jin-Soo Kim
• Keywords: Hardware, MSS 2015