Re-aligning Across-page Requests for Flash-based Solid-state Drives

Abstract

In flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), certain small unaligned I/O requests span two logical pages though their size is not larger than the basic write/read unit of SSDs (i.e. an SSD page), and we term them as across-page requests. Servicing such across-page requests triggers two separated I/O operations on different SSD pages, and thus impacts the I/O performance and the endurance of SSDs. For mitigating negative effects caused by across-page requests, this paper proposes a novel flash translation layer (FTL) scheme for SSDs to separately re-align such requests via remapping them onto a single SSD page. Consequently, both read and write requests on the across-page data can be completed with one page-level I/O operation. Through a series of experiments based on the selected disk traces of real-world applications, we demonstrate that the proposed realigning method at FTL of SSD devices, can noticeably reduce the I/O latency by between 4.6% and 11.6%, and the erase number (i.e. the indicator of SSD endurance) by between 6.4% and 19.11%, compared to state-of-the-art methods.