Title:
FlashFire: Overcoming the Performance Bottleneck of Flash Storage Technology
FlashFire: Overcoming the Performance Bottleneck of Flash Storage Technology
Author(s)
Kim, Hyojun
Ramachandran, Umakishore
Ramachandran, Umakishore
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Abstract
Flash memory based Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming
popular in the market place as a possible low-end
alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs). However, SSDs
have different performance characteristics compared to
traditional HDDs, and there has been less consideration
for SSD technology at the Operating System (OS) level.
Consequently, platforms using SSDs are often showing
performance problems especially with low-end SSDs. In this paper, we first identify the inherent characteristics
of SSD technology. Using this as the starting
point, we propose solutions that are designed to leverage
these characteristics and overcome the inherent performance
problems of SSDs. At a macro-level, we propose
a device driver-level solution called FlashFire that
uses a Cluster Buffer and Smart Scheduling of read/write
I/O requests from the OS. The net effect of this solution
is to aggregate the small random writes from the
OS into large sequential writes, and then sending them to
the physical storage. We have implemented FlashFire in
Windows XP and have conducted extensive experimental
studies using disk benchmark programs as well as real
workloads to validate its performance potential. We verified
that FlashFire is able to provide better performance
tuned to the intrinsic characteristics of SSD storages. For
instance, the slowest netbook took 74 minutes to install
MS Office 2007 package, and the time was reduced to
16 minutes with FlashFire. It is about 4.6 times better
performance than before.
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Date Issued
2010
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report