Analytic modeling of SSD write performance
Peter J. Desnoyers · 2012
Solid state drives (SSDs) update data by writing a new copy, rather than overwriting old data, causing prior copies of the same data to be invalidated. These writes are performed in units of pages, while space is reclaimed in units of multi-page erase blocks, necessitating copying of any remaining valid pages in the block before reclamation. The efficiency of this cleaning process greatly affects performance under random workloads; in particular, in SSDs the write bottleneck is typically internal media throughput, and write amplification due to additional internal copying directly reduces application throughput.