A high-performance solid-state drive by garbage collection overhead suppression

Abstract

Currently, solid-state drives (SSDs) are replacing hard-disk drives (HDDs) in many applications. However, SSDs write performance is low because of the NAND flash memory's characteristics. Particularly, the garbage collection (GC) page-copy overhead for the valid data greatly degrades the SSD performance. To suppress this overhead with the address remapping technology, a middleware, LBA scrambler, is proposed [3]. We evaluated the effects of the LBA scrambler with the Ext4 file system (FS). From the experimental results, the SSD performance is boosted by 20.0% with the assistance of the LBA scrambler, compared with the conventional system without LBA scrambler. Moreover, the total SSD energy consumption is reduced by 4.33% while its lifetime is enhanced by 3.56%.