A methodology for extracting performance parameters in solid state disks (SSDs)

Solid state disks (SSDs) consisting of NAND flash memory are being widely used in laptops, desktops, and even enterprise servers. SSDs have many advantages over hard disk drives (HDDs) in terms of reliability, performance, durability, and power efficiency. Typically, the internal hardware and software organization varies significantly from SSD to SSD and thus each SSD exhibits different parameters which influence the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a methodology which can extract several essential parameters affecting the performance of SSDs. The target parameters of SSDs considered in this paper are (1) the size of read/write unit, (2) the size of erase unit, (3) the type of NAND flash memory used, (4) the size of read buffer, and (5) the size of write buffer. Obtaining these parameters will allow us to understand the internal architecture of the target SSD better and to get the most performance out of SSD by performing SSD-specific optimizations.