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Characterizing flash memory: anomalies, observations, and applications

Published: 12 December 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Despite flash memory's promise, it suffers from many idiosyncrasies such as limited durability, data integrity problems, and asymmetry in operation granularity. As architects, we aim to find ways to overcome these idiosyncrasies while exploiting flash memory's useful characteristics. To be successful, we must understand the trade-offs between the performance, cost (in both power and dollars), and reliability of flash memory. In addition, we must understand how different usage patterns affect these characteristics. Flash manufacturers provide conservative guidelines about these metrics, and this lack of detail makes it difficult to design systems that fully exploit flash memory's capabilities. We have empirically characterized flash memory technology from five manufacturers by directly measuring the performance, power, and reliability. We demonstrate that performance varies significantly between vendors, devices, and from publicly available datasheets. We also demonstrate and quantify some unexpected device characteristics and show how we can use them to improve responsiveness and energy consumption of solid state disks by 44% and 13%, respectively, as well as increase flash device lifetime by 5.2x.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MICRO 42: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
December 2009
601 pages
ISBN:9781605587981
DOI:10.1145/1669112
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 December 2009

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Author Tags

  1. characterization
  2. flash memory
  3. non-volatile

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  • (2024)Exploit both SMART attributes and NAND flash wear characteristics to effectively forecast SSD-based storage failures in clustersProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692059(1101-1117)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)ZMSProceedings of the 2024 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3691992.3692003(173-189)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
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