Understanding the robustness of SSDS under power fault
Mai Zheng, Joseph A. Tucek, Feng Qin, Mark Lillibridge · 2013
Modern storage technology (SSDs, No-SQL databases, commoditized RAID hardware, etc.) bring new reliability challenges to the already complicated storage stack. Among other things, the behavior of these new components during power faults—which happen relatively frequently in data centers—is an important yet mostly ignored issue in this dependability-critical area. Understanding how new storage components behave under power fault is the first step towards designing new robust storage systems. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to ex-pose reliability issues in block devices under power faults. Our framework includes specially-designed hard-ware to inject power faults directly to devices, workloads to stress storage components, and techniques to detect various types of failures. Applying our testing frame-work, we test fifteen commodity SSDs from five differ-ent vendors using more than three thousand fault injec-tion cycles in total. Our experimental results reveal that thirteen out of the fifteen tested SSD devices exhibit sur-prising failure behaviors under power faults, including bit corruption, shorn writes, unserializable writes, meta-data corruption, and total device failure. 1