R&D: ReadGuard, Integrated SSD Management for Priority-Aware Read Performance Differentiation

ACM Transactions on Storage has published an article written by Myoungjun Chun, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (the Republic of), Myungsuk Kim, Kyungpook National University, Daegu Korea (the Republic of), Dusol Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul Korea (the Republic of), Jisung Park, POSTECH, Pohang Korea (the Republic of), and Jihong Kim, Seoul National University, Seoul Korea (the Republic of).

Abstract: “When multiple apps with different I/O priorities share a high-performance SSD, it is important to differentiate the I/O QoS level based on the I/O priority of each app. In this paper, we study how a modern flash-based SSD should be designed to support priority-aware read performance differentiation. From an in-depth evaluation study using 3D TLC SSDs, we observed that existing FTLs have several weaknesses that need to be improved for better read performance differentiation. In order to overcome the existing FTL weaknesses, we propose ReadGuard, a novel priority-aware SSD management technique that enables an FTL to manage its blocks in a fully read-latency-aware fashion. ReadGuard leverages a new read-latency-centric block quality marker that can accurately distinguish the read latency of a block and ensures that higher-quality blocks are used for higher-priority apps. ReadGuard extends an existing suspend/resume technique to handle collisions among reads. Our experimental results show that a ReadGuard-enabled SSD is effective in supporting differentiated read performance in modern 3D flash SSDs.“