Kyu Sik Kim, Tae Seok Kim

KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems, Vol. 8, No. 7, pp. 159-166, Jul. 2019
https://doi.org/10.3745/KTCCS.2019.8.7.159,   PDF Download:
Keywords: DRAM-Less SSD, NVMe, Host Memory Buffer
Abstract

Unlike modern Solid-State Drives with DRAM, DRAM-less SSDs do not have DRAM because they are cheap and consume less power. Obviously, they have performance degradation problem due to lack of DRAM in the controller and this problem can be alleviated by utilizing host memory buffer(HMB) feature of NVMe, which allows SSDs to utilize the DRAM of host. In this paper, we show that commercial DRAM-less SSDs surely exhibit lower I/O performance than other SSDs with DRAM, but they can be improved by utilizing the HMB feature. Through various experiments and analysis, we also show that DRAM-less SSDs mainly exploit the DRAM of host as mapping table cache rather than read cache or write buffer to improve I/O performance.

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