Dell Solid State Disk (SSD) Drives High Performance and Long Product Life

A Dell Technical White Paper

THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell. Dell, the DELL logo, and the DELL badge, PowerConnect, and PowerVault are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell Inc. disclaims any proprietary interest in trademarks and trade names other than its own.

: Bryan Martin, Dell Product Marketing Manager for HDD & SSD

Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4 Hard Drives are IOPS limited ......................................................................................... 4 Solid State Drives meet Challenges .................................................................................. 4 Performance versus Capacity ......................................................................................... 6 NAND Flash within Solid State Drives ............................................................................... 7 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 8

Figures
Figure 1. SSD, HDD IOPS- Random Transfers ....................................................................... 5 Figure 2. SSD, HDD Transfer Rate MB/sec- Sequential Transfers .............................................. 5 Figure 3. Dell Over Provisioning Performance Advantages ...................................................... 7

Introduction
Dell continues to enhance its offering of the industrys fastest Enterprise class storage medium, Solid State Disk drives (SSDs) in select PowerEdge servers, PowerVault and Equallogic storage platforms. Solid State, the use of NAND Flash as a storage medium versus traditional rotating disks, is not a new idea. Consumer electronics have made use of NAND Flash at small capacity points for over two decades. In the past, the cost of NAND and the available capacity points had made the technology impractical for use as a mass storage device. Recent increases in capacity capability combined with lowered costs for NAND Flash have allowed architecture designers to create solutions that take advantage of the inherent benefits of NAND Flash over spinning disk as a mass storage medium. Advances in the SSD controller technology have enabled SSDs to operate in the highly demanding enterprise environments with both high performance and life cycles as long as 5 years.

Hard Drives are IOPS limited

Hard disk drives are electromechanical devices that incorporate rotating magnetic platters with data laid out within bands (known as tracks) across the surfaces of each platter. Although hard drive magnetic medium technology provides superior bit density over NAND in >1.8 form factor, the hard drives incorporate mechanical actuators to move recording heads across the media as it spins to write and read data. The time involved in moving the heads (also known as seeking) is known as seek latency. It is the bottleneck in maximum HDD IOPS performance capability. Hard drive manufactures continue to increase the rotational speed of the platters and shorten the seek time as methods of overcoming this mechanical limitation. The most relevant example of this today is the Small Form Factor (2.5) 15K RPM SAS HDDs. The rotational speed is nearly 3X that of a typical Notebook Hard Drive (5.4K RPM), the stronger magnet allows for faster seek time and the media platters within the drive itself have been shrunk in diameter to 54mm, shortening the distance that the recording head has to seek in order to position itself over the desired data. While these mechanical design tenets have proven effective at gaining maximum IOPS performance out of hard disk drives, it still requires multiple toward satisfying applications with high IOPS (Input Output Per Second) requirements. This is an expensive solution to achieve high IOPS

Solid State Drives meet Challenges

SSDs have no mechanical moving parts. There is no mechanical seek time or latency to overcome. Because of this, SSDs can transfer data out as quickly as the data can be read off of the NAND Flash. While access to data is still not instantaneous, SSDs provide IOPS performance improvements over 100 times faster than enterprise class 15K RPM hard drives in customer applications that have high random I/O (input/output) requirements. For IOPS (Input Output Per Second) intensive applications, total IOPS demands can be met with a much lower number of SSDs than hard drives. This provides a total cost of ownership advantage for SSDs over hard drives. Customer applications with the most random data requirements will see the greatest benefit from SSDs over hard disk drives. On the other hand, customers with highly sequential data will see very little performance benefit with SSDs over hard disk drives. SSDs mechanical nature of no moving parts also allows SSDs to manage failure modes differently. A single headcrash on a hard disk drive is an immediate and total failure mode. SSDs can have multiple cells degrade and fail over time, prior to an enduser-impacting failure. In addition to improved IOPS performance over hard drives, enterprise class SSDs have higher reliability ratings. Enterprise class

SSDs are rated at 2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) versus most enterprise class 10K & 15K RPM SAS hard drives at 1.6 million hours MTBF.

Below are two charts with performance comparisons. The first chart shows the distinct advantages of SSDs in applications with highly random data access requirements. Typical measurements are in InputOutput operations per second. The second chart illustrates the areas where HDDs compare favorably with SSDs applications requiring sequential data transfers which tend to minimize the head movement of HDDs and maximize the streaming of data as it passes under the read/write heads.

Figure 1.

SSD, HDD IOPS- Random Transfers

Figure 2.

SSD, HDD Transfer Rate MB/sec- Sequential Transfers

Performance versus Capacity

The primary factor that affects Solid State Drive performance is the ratio of writes versus reads for customer applications. SSD Write performance can be 10x slower than Read performance. Write performance depends on how often time is spent erasing a block of flash memory prior to writing the valid data (erase time is 10x slower than writing time). A blank (new) SSD will process write requests without needing to erase any blocks, so it is very fast with no erase step involved. Once an SSD has been in use for a period of time, all the blocks may have been used and the valid data is scattered throughout the blocks. To process a new write data request in this condition, the SSD needs to free up a block. It does so by gathering the blocks data, erasing that block, inserting the new data and writing the total data into the newly erased block.

To mitigate this erase-before-write effect, over provisioning is used by Dell to provide pre-erased blocks. Over provisioning allows for the direct writing of data into the over provisioned or hidden blocks of space in the foreground operations. In the background, a cleanup routine of moving the data from the hidden area into the user area occurs. This cleanup process of freeing up and erasing blocks happens in the background and is managed to ensure that most writes to the drive do not require the slower erase step prior to writing to the sector. Having more hidden capacity in free blocks available to the SSD allows for significantly higher write performance.

The following chart illustrates the advantages of Dell OverProvisioning compared to SSDs with no OverProvisioning.

Figure 3.

Dell OverProvisioning Performance Advantages

NAND Flash within Solid State Drives

Today there are three choices for the type of NAND flash utilized within flash based Solid State Drives; SLC, MLC and TLC. SLC, or SingleLevelCell, allows for the storage of one bit of information per NAND memory cell. MLC, or MultiLevelCell allows for the storage of two bit of information per memory cell. TLC, or Tri-bit LevelCell allows for the storage of three bit of information per memory cell. TLC NAND Flash is cheaper than MLC NAND flash and MLC NAND Flash is cheaper than SLC NAND Flash. The trade-off is capacity (GB) vs. reliability/performance. TLC has twice the capacity of MLC and MLC has twice the capacity of SLC for the same footprint (at the same nanometer technology pitch). SLC NAND flash has the highest write cycle durability at 100K erases per cell, MLC typically at 5K30K erases per cell, and TLC at 300-500 erases and continues to get lower with smaller geometry nanometer pitches. Even within the NAND Flash, there are consumer-grade and enterprise-grade models. These key differences have led Dell to release our high performance SSDs with SLC-based NAND flash. Dells Enterprise class SSDs are designed to endure a 24x7 enterprise environment which includes the potential for continuous writes. For todays SSDs, Dell chose SLC to meet the requirements of the demanding enterprise environment. However MLC-based NAND flash does hold a lot of promise for mainstream solutions in the very near future within the enterprise. TLC, at this time, is not appropriate for compute and enterprise class applications.

To further increase the life of an SSD drive, wear leveling technology is incorporated in Dell Enterprise class SSDs which can meet the demands of the enterprise by ensuring that writes are distributed across the SSD in a manner that allows for maximum lifetime.

Using Enterprise class NAND technology, over provisioning techniques, and advanced controller technologies such as wear leveling, Dell has extended the life of SSDs to levels required by Enterprise customers.

Conclusion
Dells Enterprise Solid State Drive technology was developed with Enterprise performance and reliability as leading design requirements. Dell Enterprise SSDs incorporate enterprise-grade NAND flash and over-provision on flash capacity so that both read and write intensive applications benefit from SSDs. Within the enterprise, SSDs are best suited for applications that are read intensive and are highly random in their data requirements. SSDs are not well suited for highly sequential write environments. Incorporating Dell Enterprise SSDs into targeted customer enterprise environments can save on total deployment costs by allowing hard disk drive substitution at an advantaged ratio, while at the same time ensuring highly reliable and long lasting storage devices.