Power, Energy, and Thermal Considerations in SSD-Based I/O Acceleration

Solid State Disks (SSDs) have risen to prominence as an I/O accelerator with low power consumption and high energy efficiency. In this paper, we question some common assumptions regarding SSDs’ operating temperature, dynamic power, and energy consumption through extensive empirical analysis. We examine three different real high-end SSDs that respectively employ multiple channels, cores, and flash chips. Our evaluations reveal that dynamic power consumption of many-resource SSD is, on average, 5x and 4x worse than an enterprise-scale SSD and HDD, respectively. This work also addresses SSD overheating problem and power throttling issues, which result in significant performance degradation. Lastly, we offer an evidence that HW/SW optimization studies are needed to improve energy efficiency in future SSDs.