SSD characterization: From energy consumption's perspective

Abstract

In this work, we perform ?sec time scale analysis on energy consumption behavior of the SSD Write operation and exploit this information to extract key technical characteristics of SSD internals: channel utilization policy, page allocation strategy, cluster size, channel switch delay, way switch delay, etc. We found that some SSDs adopt a multi-page cluster as a write unit instead of a page. We found that SSDs adopt significantly different ways of exploiting channel-level and way-level parallelism to maximize write throughput, which governs the peak current consumption. The X25M(Intel) emphasizes the performance aspect of SSDs and linearly increases the channel parallelism as the IO size increases. The MXP(Samsung) puts more emphasis on energy consumption aspect of SSD and controls the degree of parallelism to reduce the peak current consumption. Cluster size of the X25M and the MXP correspond to one and eight pages, respectively. The current consumed when writing a page to NAND flash varies significantly depending on the NAND model(17 mA- 35 mA).