Enabling Enterprise Solid State Disks Performance

Abstract

In this paper, we examine two modern enterprise Flash-based solid state devices and how varying usage patterns influence the performance one observes from the device. We observe that in order to achieve peak sequential and random performance of an SSD, a workload needs to meet certain criteria such as high degree of concurrency. We measure the performance effects of intermediate operating system software layers between the application and device, varying the file system, I/O Scheduler, and whether or not the device is accessed in direct mode. Finally, we measure and discuss how device performance may degrade under sustained random write access across an SSD’s full address space.