Reducing Flash Memory Write Traffic by Exploiting a Few MBs of Capacitor-Powered Write Buffer Inside Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computers Vol. 68; no. 3; pp. 426 - 439
• Main Authors: Chen, Xubin, Li, Yin, Zhang, Tong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Acceleration; Buffer storage; Buffers; Capacitors; Data storage; file systems; Flash memory (computers); Memory management; Nonvolatile memory; Nonvolatile write buffer; Random access memory; Relational data bases; Solid state devices; SSD; Static random access memory
• ISSN: 0018-9340; 1557-9956
• DOI: 10.1109/TC.2018.2871683

To mitigate the long write latency of NAND flash memory, solid-state drives (SSDs) typically use capacitor-powered SRAM or DRAM to realize internal nonvolatile write buffering. Due to the cost and size constraints, intra-SSD capacitors can only power a very small amount (e.g., 8 MB or 16 MB) of nonvolatile write buffer. As a result, most commercial SSDs simply use the few MBs of capacitor-powered write buffer in the first-in first-out (FIFO) manner without employing any advanced data eviction policy. This paper presents a set of design strategies across the application and storage device levels that can effectively leverage the very small intra-SSD write buffer to noticeably reduce the amount of data being physically written to NAND flash memory. These cross-layer design strategies are primarily geared towards mainstream applications (e.g., database and filesystem) that heavily involve logging/journaling operations. This paper discusses different strategies for realizing flash memory write traffic reduction through nominal application-level modifications, and presents solutions to accordingly manage the write buffer at small processing and memory resource usage inside SSDs. To evaluate the potential effectiveness, we carried out case studies based upon popular open-source relational databases and filesystem. With only 8 MB of intra-SSD capacitor-powered write buffer, our experimental results show that the developed design solutions can reduce up to 39.7, 36.5, and 52.9 percent of total NAND flash memory write traffic for MySQL, ext4, and PostgreSQL, respectively.