Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance

To read the compete paper by Nitin Agrawal (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobber, John D. Davis, Mark Manasse and Rina Panigrahy (Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley), click on:

Abstract
Solid-state disks (SSDs) have the potential to revolutionize the storage system landscape. However, there is little published work about their internal organization or the design choices that SSD manufacturers face in pursuit of optimal performance. This paper presents a taxonomy of such design choices and analyzes the likely performance of various configurations using a trace-driven simulator and workload traces extracted from real systems. We find that SSD performance and lifetime is highly workloadsensitive, and that complex systems problems that normally appear higher in the storage stack, or even in distributed systems, are relevant to device firmware.