StorageMojo has a post about Microsoft Research’s paper on Design TradeOffs of SSD.
Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance
July 15th, 2008 by Robin Harris in Architecture, Future Tech, SSD/Flash Disk
A new Usenix paper looks at NAND flash SSD performance. From a team at Microsoft Research and the University of Wisconsin, including Ted Wobber who worked on last year’s A Design for High-Performance Flash Disks [see Flash chance for the StorageMojo take on that excellent paper - a post Ted was kind enough to review and comment on].
Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance (by Nitin Agrawal, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobber, John D. Davis, Mark Manasse and Rina Panigrahy) makes a deep dive in flash translation layer (FTL) issues. As the authors note, flash vendors keep their FTL designs secret, so the team developed a NAND flash simulator to look at how design choices affected performance.
What they found
They ran several workloads on their trace-based simulator, including TPC-C, Exchange and some file system benchmarks. They found several critical issues in SSD design.
- Data placement Needed for wear leveling and load balancing.
- Parallelism Single flash chips aren’t very fast so they need to work together.
- Write ordering Small random writes are a killer.
- Workload management You can optimize for sequential or random workloads, but managing both well is hard.
and as StorageMojo closes you need to read the Microsoft Research paper to get a full understanding.
The StorageMojo take
This paper is too rich in detail to summarize well. If understanding SSD controller design is important there is no substitute for a careful read.The net is that engineers have many options in configuring and managing flash devices inside a solid state disk. The interaction of these design choices with applications is likely to remain a fruitful area of study for years to come.
Expect to see many performance oddities as new solid state disk designs are released. This is a different world than disk drives. There is much innovation and much to learn.
A macro longer-term trade-off is the extent to which SSD vendors should attempt to alter operating system behavior to better match SSDs. In the short term designers must conform to today’s disk I/O oriented operating systems. In the long term however, there must be major opportunities to tweak operating systems to enhance solid-state disk performance.
For this reason SSDs is may find their best short term market to be inside storage arrays where array vendors have complete control over the interface to the array software. This will be no small advantage as array vendors struggle to remain relevant in a world where high performance solid state disks have the potential to replace midsize arrays.
James Hamilton also has a post referring to Spansion’s Flash Memory announcement.