Understanding NAND’s Intrinsic Characteristics Critical Role in Solid State Drive (SSD) Design

The use of NAND flash-based SSDs in enterprises has grown at a ~33% compound annual growth rate [1] worldwide for the past three years. The majority of the growth comes from enterprise data center applications where the trend is to leverage the cost benefits of using MLC and TLC NAND flash memory by focusing on the use model behavior to optimize performance and life characteristics. In the data center, requirements for these MLC/TLC SSDs demand high sequential performance and reliability, moderate IOPS, and low power consumption along with maintaining 3 to 5 years of useful life. These challenges are tackled by tightening the links between the SSD's operation, host operating environment, and intrinsic NAND memory behavior and by exploiting increasingly sophisticated controllers, firmware, and flash memory error management techniques.