Abstract

Solid-state drives (SSDs) that do not have internal dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) are being widely spread for client SSD and embedded SSD markets in recent years because they are cheap and consume less power. Obviously, their performance is lower than conventional SSDs because they cannot exploit advantages of DRAM in the controller. However, this problem can be alleviated by using host memory buffer (HMB) feature of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), which allows SSDs to utilize the DRAM of host. In this paper, we show that commercial DRAM-less SSDs clearly exhibit worse I/O performance than SSDs with internal DRAM, but this can be improved by using the HMB feature. We also present methods that reveal how the host memory buffer is used in commercial DRAM-less SSDs to improve I/O performance. Through extensive experiments, we conclude that DRAM-less SSDs evaluated in this study mainly exploit the host memory buffer as an address mapping table cache rather than a read cache or write buffer to improve I/O performance.

Highlights

  • For the last decade, almost solid-state drives (SSDs) have included dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in their controller to improve input/output (I/O) performance and endurance

  • We studied the effects and roles of the host memory buffer (HMB) in commercial DRAM-less SSDs that support the HMB feature

  • We first experimentally showed that commercial DRAM-less SSDs have worse I/O performance than SSDs with internal DRAM, but they can improve it when using the HMB feature of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)

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Summary

OPEN ACCESS

Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript.

Introduction
Background and related work HMB feature of NVMe interface
Internal SSD information for optimization
Processor Main memory OS Benchmark tool
Use of HMB as a read cache
Use of HMB as a write buffer
Use of HMB as a mapping table cache
Conclusion and future work
Findings
Author Contributions
Full Text
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