Design tradeoffs of SSDs: From energy consumption's perspective

Seokhei Cho, Changhyun Park, Youjip Won*, Sooyong Kang, Jaehyuk Cha, Sungroh Yoon, Jongmoo Choi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this work, we studied the energy consumption characteristics of various SSD design parameters. We developed an accurate energy consumption model for SSDs that computes aggregate, as well as component-specific, energy consumption of SSDs in sub-msec time scale. In our study, we used five different FTLs (page mapping, DFTL, block mapping, and two different hybrid mappings) and four different channel configurations (two, four, eight, and 16 channels) under seven different workloads (from large-scale enterprise systems to small-scale desktop applications) in a combinatorial manner. For each combination of the aforementioned parameters, we examined the energy consumption for individual hardware components of an SSD (microcontroller, DRAM, NAND flash, and host interface). The following are some of our findings. First, DFTL is the most energy-efficient address-mapping scheme among the five FTLs we tested due to its good write amplification and small DRAM footprint. Second, a significant fraction of energy is being consumed by idle flash chips waiting for the completion of NAND operations in the other channels. FTL should be designed to fully exploit the internal parallelism so that energy consumption by idle chips is minimized. Third, as a means to increase the internal parallelism, increasing way parallelism (the number of flash chips in a channel) is more effective than increasing channel parallelism in terms of peak energy consumption, performance, and hardware complexity. Fourth, in designing high-performance and energy-efficient SSDs, channel switching delay, way switching delay, and page write latency need to be incorporated in an integrated manner to determine the optimal configuration of internal parallelism.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8
Pages (from-to)1-24
Number of pages24
JournalACM Transactions on Storage
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Energy consumption
  • FTL
  • NAND flash
  • Parallelism
  • Simulator
  • SSD

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