UC San Diego

As our society becomes more information-driven, we have begun to amass data at an astounding and accelerating rate. At the same time, power concerns have made it difficult to bring the necessary processing power to bear on querying, processing and understanding this data. In light of this, system designers have begun to adopt high density NAND flash memory as the solution for storing data at low power. However, our knowledge about the trade-offs in managing the technology is in its infancy. In this work, we empirically characterize a representative selection of NAND flash memory technology by directly measuring its performance, power and reliability. We show these properties vary significantly from publicly available information, that most metrics are failing as density increases and that symbiotic coordination between device and application variations holds the key to designing modern storage systems. We demonstrate how to improve the following properties of flash-based solid state drives: decreased latency of critical IO requests by 44%, decreased energy consumption by 13%, increased lifetime by up to 5.2x, decreased latency of single-file erasure by more than 95%, increased performance of bursts by 36% and increased steady state performance by 95%