In this paper, we study the performance of solid-state drives that employ flash technology as storage medium. Our prime objective is to understand how the scheduling of the user-generated read and write commands and the read, write, and erase operations induced by the garbage-collection process affect the basic performance measures throughput and latency. We demonstrate that the most straightforward scheduling that prioritizes the processing of garbage-collection-related commands over user-related commands suffers from severe latency deficiencies. These problems can be overcome by using a more sophisticated priority scheme that minimizes the user-perceived latency without throughput penalty or deadlock exposure. Using both analysis and simulation, we investigate how these schemes perform under a variety of system design parameters and workloads. Our results can be directly applied to the engineering of a performance-optimized solid-state-drive system.
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