Improving Performance of Flash Storage Using Restricted Copyback

Duwon Hong, Seulgi Shin, Jihong Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2019.46.8.726

In case of modern flash-based SSDs, the performance overhead of internal data migrations is dominated by the data transfer time and not by the flash program time as in old SSDs. In order to mitigate the performance impact of data migrations, we propose rcopyback, a restricted version of copyback. Rcopyback works in a manner similar to the original copyback except that only n consecutive copybacks are allowed. By limiting the number of successive copybacks, the version guarantees internal migration of data using rcopyback without any reliability problem. In order to take a full advantage of rcopyback, we developed a rcopyback-aware FTL, rcFTL, which intelligently decides whether rcopyback should be used or not by exploiting varying host workloads. Our evaluation results show that rcFTL can improve the overall I/O throughput by 54% on average over an existing FTL which does not use copybacks.