Understanding and Optimizing Hybrid SSD with High-Density and Low-Cost Flash Memory

Abstract

With the development of NAND flash technology, hybrid SSDs with high-density and low-cost flash memory have become the mainstream of the existing SSD architecture. In this architecture, two flash modes can be dynamically switched, such as single-level cell (SLC) mode and quad-level cell (QLC) mode. Based on evaluations and analysis of multiple real devices, this paper presents two interesting findings. They demonstrate that the coordination between the two flash-modes is not well-designed in existing architectures. This paper proposes HyFlex, which redesigns the strategies of data placement and flash-mode management of hybrid SSDs in a flexible approach. Specifically, two novel optimization strategies are proposed: velocity-based I/O scheduling (VIS) and garbage collection (GC)-aware capacity tuning (GCT). Experimental results show that HyFlex achieves encouraging performance and endurance improvement.