Understanding intrinsic characteristics and system implications of flash memory based solid state drives

Flash Memory based Solid State Drive (SSD) has been called a “pivotal technology” that could revolutionize data storage systems. Since SSD shares a common interface with the traditional hard disk drive (HDD), both physically and logically, an effective integration of SSD into the storage hierarchy is very important. However, details of SSD hardware implementations tend to be hidden behind such narrow interfaces. In fact, since sophisticated algorithms are usually, of necessity, adopted in SSD controller firmware, more complex performance dynamics are to be expected in SSD than in HDD systems. Most existing literature or product specifications on SSD just provide high-level descriptions and standard performance data, such as bandwidth and latency. In order to gain insight into the unique performance characteristics of SSD, we have conducted intensive experiments and measurements on different types of state-of-the-art SSDs, from low-end to high-end products. We have observed sev...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Feng Chen, David A. Koufaty, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Hardware, Performance, SIGMETRICS 2009, SSD Hardware Implementations, SSD Shares