SSD Failures in Datacenters

Abstract

Despite the growing popularity of Solid State Disks (SSDs) in the datacenter, little is known about their reliability characteristics in the field. The little knowledge is mainly vendor supplied, which cannot really help understand how SSD failures can manifest and impact production systems, in order to take appropriate actions. Besides failure data, a detailed characterization requires wide spectrum of data about factors influencing SSD failures, right from provisioning (what models' where and when deployed' etc.) to the operational ones (workloads, read-write intensities, write amplification, etc.). We analyze over half a million SSDs that span multiple generations spread across several datacenters which host a wide range of workloads over nearly 3 years. By studying the diverse set of factors on SSD failures, and their symptoms, our work provides the first look at the what, when and why characteristics of SSD failures in production datacenters.