Assessing the Role of Program Suspend Operation in 3D NAND Flash Based Solid State Drives

Abstract

3D NAND Flash is the preferred storage medium for dense mass storage applications, including Solid State Drives and multimedia cards. Improving the latency of these systems is a mandatory task to narrow the gap between computing elements, such as CPUs and GPUs, and the storage environment. To this extent, relatively time-consuming operations in the storage media, such as data programming and data erasing, need to be prioritized and be potentially suspendable by shorter operations, like data reading, in order to improve the overall system quality of service. However, such benefits are strongly dependent on the storage characteristics and on the timing of the single operations. In this work, we investigate, through an extensive characterization, the impacts of suspending the data programming operation in a 3D NAND Flash device. System-level simulations proved that such operations must be carefully characterized before exercising them on Solid State Drives to eventually understand the performance benefits introduced and to disclose all the potential shortcomings.