SUPA: A Single Unified Read-Write Buffer and Pattern-Change-Aware FTL for the High Performance of Multi-Channel SSD

Abstract

To design the write buffer and flash translation layer (FTL) for a solid-state drive (SSD), previous studies have tried to increase overall SSD performance by parallel I/O and garbage collection overhead reduction. Recent works have proposed pattern-based managements, which uses the request size and read-or write-intensiveness to apply different policies to each type of data. In our observation, the locations of read and write requests are closely related, and the pattern of each type of data can be changed. In this work, we propose SUPA, a single unified read-write buffer and pattern-change-aware FTL on multi-channel SSD architecture. To increase both read and write hit ratios on the buffer based on locality, we use a single unified read-write buffer for both clean and dirty blocks. With proposed buffer, we can increase buffer hit ratio up to 8.0% and reduce 33.6% and 7.5% of read and write latencies, respectively. To handle pattern-changed blocks, we add a pattern handler between the buffer and the FTL, which monitors channel status and handles data by applying one of the two different policies according to the pattern changes. With pattern change handling process, we can reduce 1.0% and 15.4% of read and write latencies, respectively. In total, our evaluations show that SUPA can get up to 2.0 and 3.9 times less read and write latency, respectively, without loss of lifetime in comparison to previous works.