Centaur: A Novel Architecture for Reliable, Low-Wear, High-Density 3D NAND Storage, In Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems (POMACS Journal) (SIGMETRICS'20)

Abstract

Due to the high density storage demand coming from applications from different domains, 3D NAND flash is becoming a promising candidate to replace 2D NAND flash as the dominant non-volatile memory. However, denser 3D NAND presents various performance and reliability issues, which can be addressed by the 3D NAND specific full-sequence program (FSP) operation. The FSP programs multiple pages simultaneously to mitigate the performance degradation caused by the long latency 3D NAND baseline program operations. However, the FSP-enabled 3D NAND-based SSDs introduce lifetime degradation due to the larger write granularities accessed by the FSP. To address the lifetime issue, in this paper, we propose and experimentally evaluate Centaur, a heterogeneous 2D/3D NAND heterogeneous SSD, as a solution. Centaur has three main components: a lifetime-aware inter-NAND request dispatcher, a lifetime-aware inter-NAND work stealer, and a data migration strategy from 2D NAND to 3D NAND. We used twelve SSD workloads to compare Centaur against a state-of-the-art 3D NAND-based SSD with the same capacity. Our experimental results indicate that the SSD lifetime and performance are improved by 3.7x and 1.11x, respectively, when using our 2D/3D heterogeneous SSD.