Improving performance and lifetime of solid-state drives using hardware-accelerated compression

The performance and lifetime of highperformance solid-state drives (SSDs) can be improved by data compression, which can reduce the amount of data physically transferred from/to flash memory. In this paper, we present our experience of building a high-performance solid-state drive using a hardware accelerated compression module called BlueZIP. In order to fully exploit the BlueZIP module, we devise a compression-aware flash translation layer (FTL), called CaFTL, which supports compressionaware address mapping and garbage collection for BlueZIP. For poorly compressed pages, CaFTL supports selective compression so that unnecessary compression can be avoided. We have implemented a complete SSD prototype with BlueZIP on an FPGA-based custom SSD platform and evaluated its effectiveness using realistic workloads. Our evaluation results show that BlueZIP can increase the lifetime of the SSD prototype by 26% as well as improve read and write performance by 20% and 27%, respectively, on average¹.