The pitfalls of deploying solid-state drive RAIDs
Nikolaus Jeremic, Gero Mühl, Anselm Busse, Jan Richling · 2011
Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are about to radically change the way we look at storage systems. Without moving mechanical parts, they have the potential to supplement or even replace hard disks in performance-critical applications in the near future. Storage systems applied in such settings are usually built using RAIDs consisting of a bunch of individual drives for both performance and reliability reasons. Most existing work on SSDs, however, deals with the architecture at system level, the ash translation layer (FTL), and their influence on the overall performance of a single SSD device. Therefore, it is currently largely unclear whether RAIDs of SSDs exhibit different performance and reliability characteristics than those comprising hard disks and to which issues we have to pay special attention to ensure optimal operation in terms of performance and reliability.