Performance improvement of I/O subsystems exploiting the characteristics of solid state drives
ICCSA'11 Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Computational science and its applications - Volume Part III
SFS: random write considered harmful in solid state drives
FAST'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
FIOS: a fair, efficient flash I/O scheduler
FAST'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
FlashFQ: a fair queueing I/O scheduler for flash-based SSDs
USENIX ATC'13 Proceedings of the 2013 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
| Hi-index | 14.98 |
Solid state disks (SSDs) have many advantages over hard disk drives, including better reliability, performance, durability, and power efficiency. However, the characteristics of SSDs are completely different from those of hard disk drives with rotating disks. To achieve the full potential performance improvement with SSDs, operating systems or applications must understand the critical performance parameters of SSDs to fine-tune their accesses. However, the internal hardware and software organizations vary significantly among SSDs and, thus, each SSD exhibits different parameters which influence the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a methodology which can extract several essential parameters affecting the performance of SSDs, and apply the extracted parameters to SSD systems for performance improvement. The target parameters of SSDs considered in this paper are 1) the size of read/write unit, 2) the size of erase unit, 3) the size of read buffer, and 4) the size of write buffer. We modify two operating system components to optimize their operations with the SSD parameters. The experimental results show that such parameter-aware management leads to significant performance improvements for large file accesses by performing SSD-specific optimizations.