Access Characteristic Guided Partition for Read Performance Improvement on Solid State Drives

Abstract

Solid state drives (SSDs) are now widely deployed due to the development of high-density and low-cost NAND flash memories. Previous works have identified that the read performance of SSDs is degrading along with the development. One of the most critical reasons is the access interference between reads and writes, as the latest NAND flash memories have significant latency gap between reads and writes. This paper addresses this issue with the assistance of access characteristic guided SSD partitioning. First, several server workloads are studied and it is shown that reads and writes can be separated based on their access characteristics. Second, a set of techniques is proposed to place data judiciously for requests separation. Finally, a workload based SSD partitioning scheme is proposed to improve the read performance. The experimental results show that the proposed solution can improve read performance by 36% on average compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.