Read Refresh Scheduling and Data Reallocation against Read Disturb in SSDs

Read disturb is a circuit-level noise in flash-based Solid-State Drives (SSDs), induced by intensive read requests, which may result in unexpected read errors. The approach of read refresh (RR) is commonly adopted to mitigate its negative effects by unconditionally migrating all valid data pages in the RR block to another new block. However, routine RR operations greatly impact the I/O responsiveness of SSDs, because the processing on normal I/O requests must be blocked at the same time. To further reduce the negative effects of read refresh, this article proposes a read refresh scheduling and data reallocation method to deal with two primary issues with respect to an RR operation, including where to place data pages and when to trigger page migrations. Specifically, we first construct a data reallocation model to match the data pages in the RR block and the destination blocks for addressing the issue of where to place the data. The model considers not only the read hotness of pages in the RR block, but also the accumulated read counts of the destination blocks. Moreover, for addressing the issue of when to trigger data migrations, we build a timing decision model to determine the time points for completing page migrations by considering the factors of the intensity of I/Os and the disturb situation on the RR block. Through a series of simulation experiments based on several realistic disk traces, we illustrate that the proposed RR scheduling and data reallocation mechanism can noticeably reduce the read errors by more than 10.3%, on average, and the long-tail latency by between 43.9% and 64.0% at the 99.99th percentile, in contrast to state-of-the-art methods.