Tag: Garbage Collection

SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power

More Power-Less PowerThe Storage Developer Conference in September gave a rare glimpse into two very different directions that SSD architectures are pursuing.  While some of the conference’s presentations touted SSDs with increasing processing power (Eideticom, NGD, Samsung, and ScaleFlux) other presentations advocated moving processing power out of the SSD and into the host server (Alibaba, CNEX, and Western Digital).

Why would either of these make sense?

A standard SSD has a very high internal bandwidth that encounters a bottleneck as data is forced through a narrower interface.  It’s easy to see that an SSD with 20+ NAND chips, each with an 8-bit interface, could access all 160 bits simultaneously.  Since there’s already a processor inside the  SSD, why not open it to external programming so that it can perform certain tasks within the SSD itself and harness all of that bandwidth?

Example tasks would include Continue reading “SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power”

SSD Garbage Collection

garbage cansOne of the thorniest issues in SSD design how to manage erasing blocks that are no longer in use.  That’s saying a lot, because NAND flash presents so very many difficult challenges like wear leveling, bad block management, error correction, and write amplification.

The difficulty stems from the fact that all of today’s software was written for HDDs which don’t behave like the flash in an SSD.  An HDD can over-write existing data with new data.  In a flash SSD, a block must be erased before being over-written and this can take a half a second – a huge amount of time in the world of computing.  Since the software doesn’t accommodate flash’s “erase-before-write” needs, the controller inside the SSD must take care of this bit of housekeeping.  Unused and unerased blocks are moved out of the way and erased in the background.  This is called the “garbage collection” process. Continue reading “SSD Garbage Collection”