ZNS SSDs are emerging storage devices promising low cost, high performance, and software definability. This paper proposes Balloon-ZNS that enables transparent compression in ZNS SSDs to enhance cost efficiency. ZNS SSDs, unlike traditional SSDs, require data pages to be stored in logical zones and flash blocks with aligned offsets, conflicting with the management of compressed, variable-length pages. Motivated by a key observation that compressibility locality widely exists in data streams, Balloon-ZNS employs a compressibility-adaptive, slot-aligned storage management scheme to address the intractable conflict. Evaluation with RocksDB shows Balloon-ZNS can reap more than 80% of the compression gain while achieving 7.3% lower to 14.4% higher throughput than a vanilla ZNS SSD, on average, when data compressibility is not poor.

NVMe zoned namespace (ZNS) SSDs present a new class of storage devices with attractive features including low cost, software definability, and stable performance. However, one primary culprit that hinders the adoption of ZNS is the high garbage collection (GC) overhead it brings to host software. The ZNS interface divides the logical address space into size-fixed zones that must be written sequentially. Despite being friendly to flash memory, ZNS requires host software to perform out-of-place updates and GC on individual zones. Current ZNS SSDs typically employ a large zone size (e.g., of GBs) to be conducive to die-level RAID protection on flash memory. This impedes flexible data placement, such as mixing data with different lifetimes in the same zone, and incurs sizable data migrations during zone GC. To address this problem, we propose FlexZNS, a novel ZNS SSD design that provides reliable zoned storage allowing host software to configure the zone size flexibly as well as multiple zone sizes. The size variability of zones poses two interrelated challenges, one for the SSD controller to establish per-zone RAID protection, and the other for host software to manage variable zone capacity loss caused by parity storage. To tackle the challenges, FlexZNS decouples the storage of parity from individual zones on flash memory and hides the zone capacity loss from the host software. We verify FlexZNS on a ZNS-compatible file system F2FS and a popular key-value store RocksDB. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlexZNS can significantly improve the system performance and reduce GC-induced write amplification, compared with a conventional ZNS SSD with large-sized zones.

Background (BG)tasks are maintained indispensably in multiple layers of storage systems, from applications to flash-based SSDs. They launch a large amount of I/Os, causing significant interference withforeground (FG)I/O performance. Our key insight is that, to mitigate such interference, holistic scheduling of system-wide, multi-source BG I/Os is required and can only be realized at the underlying SSD layer. Only the SSD has a global view of all FG and BG I/Os as well as direct information and control about flash storage resources. We are thus inspired to propose a novel I/O scheduling architecture, calledHuFu. It provides a framework for host software to register BG tasks and offload their I/O scheduling into the SSD. Then, the SSD-internal I/O scheduler prioritizes FG I/O processing, while BG I/Os are scheduled opportunistically by utilizing flash parallelism and idleness. To verifyHuFu, we perform case studies on RocksDB and compares it with several state-of-the-art host-side I/O scheduling schemes. Experimental results show thatHuFucan significantly alleviate performance interference caused by BG I/Os and improve SSD bandwidth utilization, thus improving the FG throughput, average and tail latencies (e.g., by about 18% in a write-heavy workload).

Solid-state drive (SSD) gradually dominates in the high-performance storage scenarios. Three-dimension (3D) NAND flash memory owning high-storage capacity is becoming a mainstream storage component of SSD. However, the interferences of the new 3D charge-trap (CT) NAND flash are getting unprecedentedly complicated, yielding to many problems regarding reliability and performance. Alleviating these problems needs to understand the characteristics of 3D CT NAND flash memory deeply. To facilitate such understanding, in this article, we delve into characterizing the performance, reliability, and threshold voltage ( V th ) distribution of 3D CT NAND flash memory. We make a summary of these characteristics with multiple interferences and variations and give several new insights and a characterization methodology. Especially, we characterize the skewed ( V th ) distribution, ( V th ) shift laws, and the exclusive layer variation in 3D NAND flash memory. The characterization is the backbone of designing more reliable and efficient flash-based storage solutions.

3D NAND flash memory faces unprecedented complicated interference than planar NAND flash memory, resulting in more concern regarding reliability and performance. Stronger error correction code (ECC) and adaptive reading strategies are proposed to improve the reliability and performance taking a threshold voltage (Vth) distribution model as the backbone. However, the existing modeling methods are challenged to develop such a Vthdistribution model for 3D NAND flash memory. To facilitate it, in this paper, we propose a machine learning-based modeling method. It employs a neural network taking advantage of the existing modeling methods and fully considers multiple interferences and variations in 3D NAND flash memory. Compared with state-of-the-art models, evaluations demonstrate it is more accurate and efficient for predicting Vthdistribution.