Analysis of Performance for NAND Flash Based SSDs via Using Host Semantic Information

Abstract

The use of flash memory based storage devices is rapidly increasing, and user demands for high performance are also constantly increasing. The performance of the flash storage device is greatly influenced by cleaning operations of Flash Translation Layer (FTL). Various studies have been conducted to lower the cost of cleaning operations. However, there are limits to achieve sufficient performance improvement of flash storages without help of a host system, with only limited information in storage devices. Recently, SCSI, eMMC, and UFS standards provide an interface for sending semantic information from a host system to a storage device. In this paper, we analyze effects of semantic information on performance and lifetime of flash storage devices. We evaluate performance and lifetime improvement through SA-FTL (Semantic Aware Flash Translation Layer), which can take advantage of semantic information in storage devices. Experiments show that SA-FTL improves performance and lifetime of flash based storages by up to 30 and 35%, respectively, compared to a simple page-level FTL.