New Middleware Technology Quadruples SSD Speed? | Hacker News Reader

New Middleware Technology Quadruples SSD Speed?

techon.nikkeibp.co.jp

80 pointsdaureg25 comments

This is just some PR wildly exaggerating results from a SSD garbage collection paper.

The linked graphs show the big improvement in just one of many workloads and only in the case where the SSD is near-full, and don't show what disk/ftl they're comparing against. But even then these are their own hand picked benchmarks. (presumably the details will be published along with the paper at some point)

The trick itself is that they scramble the LBA addresses of blocks with some 1:1 function. But it raises the question why the FTL doesn't already do this. Which is a reason to suspect they're benchmarking against some el cheapo SSD with a dumb FTL.

Sounds basically like the fundamental research on log structured file systems done back in 1992. http://www.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/lfs.pdf

i wonder if this is something similar to USB Supercharger [1]? i personally used this back in the USB 2.0 days to make running Firefox Portable bearable from what was already the fastest 4k random flash drive [2]. The write speed increase was truly astonishing, there was nothing like it on the market. If you look at their CrystalDiskMark screenshots, the 4k random goes up from 0.01 MB/s to 10MB/s - no joke. On my faster drive the increase was only a mere 100x.

[1] http://easyco.com/usb-sc.htm

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Xporter-Boost-Flash-PEF8GUSB/d...

It looks quite suspicious. Are you sure they don't just turn on the OS-provided write caching on the USB drive, which is by default turned off? No need for any additional program:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-optimize-usb-dri...

There's nothing on http://easyco.com/usb-sc.htm which would assure me they are doing something special.

pretty sure it was ntfs formatted, so it would have already been enabled. not only that, they actually have a custom partition that gets created and needs to be mounted for their stuff to work. it doesnt "just work", so there's more going on there.

If the write cache is on (as you claim it was!) you don't benchmark the times it takes for some write actually end on the medium, only the time be copied to the RAM, so the measurements you quote have no sense.

They also mention on their page "when the light stops blinking it's over" which means exactly this: the software already consider everything copied, but the movement from the RAM to the device still goes on -- and that is not measured. Moreover, the OS can combine more writes to the same area to one to the device so you can actually observe less writes to the device. I still suspect that software to be a kind of snake oil.

interesting. i think i still have a license left if you want to test it out, lemme know.

Even without the license, I have already some time ago measured the overhead of copying a lot of small files with and without OS write cache. They cite 1 GB data with the average file size of 154 KB which gives around 6500 files to copy, all on FAT32 (see "How fast is SuperCharger?") The overhead of the write cache turned off for that number of files on the old stick I had (on FAT32) was around 2 minutes and that, of course, measuring "the blinking stops" in the "on" case.

If I recall correctly, the way it worked was to save up and write MUCH larger blocks... far more than Windows write caching would do. That way it would do one large sequential write rather than multiple small random writes (which is a killer for most consumer flash drives and the limiting bit in terms of using portable apps from flash drives). And it abstracted it all so that the individual files were stored in its own container. As such, you had to be absolutely sure you were safe ejecting.

Fun fact: you can get some of the same effect by using something like TrueCrypt containers on flash media as you wind up with a bit of the same behavior. The downside is that you can then only use it on a machine you have admin rights on or a machine where TrueCrypt is already installed and traveler mode enabled.

Source: I created Portable Firefox and run PortableApps.com.

>USB Supercharger [1]?

This seems to be clumping many small random writes into one big linear write.

Another, much more impressive hack was TurboUSB/TurboHDD USB. +30% read speed. I think it was a custom driver that modified bulk transfer chink size.

This post is quite vague on the details, but I came across a a more detailed paper recently that also promised big gains:

http://www.ece.eng.wayne.edu/~sjiang/pubs/papers/ouyang14-SD...

SDF: Software-Deﬁned Flash for Web-Scale Internet Storage Systems

Working with/as Baidu, they are using an FPGA as a custom flash controller that exposes the underlying "channels" more directly.

It is stupendous how much effort we are using to make our nice flash disks look like the old rusty rotary ones instead of (re)writing our software to be aware of the true characteristics of the underlying hardware.

Intel has spent the better part of 30 years trying to convince you their latest processor is the same as a 8086.

And IBM has maintained almost 40 years of backwards compatibility with System360.

Certain things never die.

Inserting an abstraction layer is a lot cheaper than rewriting all software.

  our software to be aware of the true characteristics of the underlying hardware.

Ewww, no.

That's a terrible goal, and a poor understanding of how things currently work.

Traditional spinning disks aren't dumb devices. There is a lot of stuff happening at the firmware level. Address translation, remapping of bad sectors to spare sectors, command queuing, etc.

It's complicated stuff, to put it mildly, and you're suggesting that we ought to duplicate these tasks across every app and/or driver and/or OS?

Even if (to choose a single, arbitrary application) Postgres had some kind of really specialized code that bypassed the SATA protocol and had direct access to the physical flash memory cells of a single manufacturer's SSD firmware, the odds of achieving a performance win are pretty low and the complexity of Postgres is sure to have increased sharply.

Maybe you could move up a level, and have that kind of specialization at the driver level and not the application level, but still: yuck. Hardware and software creators should focus on kicking ass at implementing protocols, not on ignoring protocols and creating compatibility nightmares.

> It's complicated stuff, to put it mildly, and you're suggesting that we ought to duplicate these tasks across every app and/or driver and/or OS?

I was thinking the filesystem layer.

> Hardware and software creators should focus on kicking ass at implementing protocols, not on ignoring protocols and creating compatibility nightmares.

I didn't mean that protocols should be ignored. I did mean that the protocols should evolve. Of course the transition period might be bit painful.

Some existing work:

Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_NAND_Flash_Interface_Worki... (note the "Block Abstracted NAND" which is an example of the kind of mid-way solution I'm thinking of)

UBIFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBIFS this also has layered approach, UBI layer for managing the raw flash and then on top of it the proper FS.

I re-read my initial post and I just wanted to say that my negative tone was totally out of line. I'm sorry I posted such a condescending and snarky reply.

I think you really do raise an interesting point, and thank you for the links!

They just increase fragmentation and decrease amount of data written to disk. These are very traditional trade offs especially with database WAL and LSFS. They didn't tell if it decreases read speed, because even if SSD 'seek times' are low, most drives read random blocks from disk much slower than linear data. Which means that fragmenting data especially in very small blocks might cause reduce the drive read speed.

I wonder if this reduces durability as it inhibits the NAND block rewrite balancing or whatever it's called

"In a simulation, the research team confirmed that the new technology improves the writing speed of SSD by up to 300% and reduces power consumption by up to 60% and the number of write/erase cycles by up to 55%, increasing product life. Because, with the new method, it is not necessary to make any changes to NAND flash memory, and the method is completed within the middleware, it can be applied to existing SSDs as it is."

Promising news! Essentially removing fragmentation on the fly instead of just accepting it as a done deal on SSD

Is there a way to actually access the NAND chips in a better way? Having the ssd firmware guessing stuff seams like quite a waste.

Didn't realize NAND flash memory couldn't write over itself...ie it is constantly having to use new storage areas

It can write over itself, but does so in pages which are typically larger than the amount of data you want to write. So you have to find a page to write, read it, modify the data in memory, erase the page, then write to it. I think the page size actually varies but wikipedia[1] says 256KB.

You also want to spread out your writes anyway, because each NAND cell has a limited number of program/erase cycles before it stops accepting writes.

This is why TRIM support was such a big deal a few years ago, since it let the OS communicate when a filesystem block was no longer in use, simplifying the above to erase-then-write or in some cases, just write.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification#Basic_SSD_...

You dont need to erase every time. Erased page is all ones (#FFFFF). If data you modify doesnt need more active bits than it started with you can simply overwrite. This means you can do things like counting down on the same NAND page without erasing every single time. Just make sure you only flip 1s to 0s.

They only got FTL wrong, because it's a Faster Than Light engine.

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