Performance Modeling and Practical Use Cases for Black-Box SSDs

Abstract

Modern servers are actively deploying Solid-State Drives (SSDs) thanks to their high throughput and low latency. However, current server architects cannot achieve the full performance potential of commodity SSDs, as SSDs are complex devices designed for specific goals (e.g., latency, throughput, endurance, cost) with their internal mechanisms undisclosed to users. In this article, we propose SSDcheck, a novel SSD performance model to extract various internal mechanisms and predict the latency of next access to commodity black-box SSDs. We identify key performance-critical features (e.g., garbage collection, write buffering) and find their parameters (i.e., size, threshold) from each SSD by using our novel diagnosis code snippets. Then, SSDcheck constructs a performance model for a target SSD and dynamically manages the model to predict the latency of the next access. In addition, SSDcheck extracts and provides other useful internal mechanisms (e.g., fetch unit in multi-queue SSDs, background tasks triggering idle-time interval) for the storage system to fully exploit SSDs. By using those useful features and the performance model, we propose multiple practical use cases. Our evaluations show that SSDcheck's performance model is highly accurate, and proposed use cases achieve significant performance improvement in various scenarios.