Operational Characteristics of SSDs in Enterprise Storage Systems: A Large-Scale Field Study

As we increasingly rely on SSDs for our storage needs, it is important to understand their operational characteristics in the field, in particular since they vary from HDDs. This includes operational aspects, such as the level of write amplification experienced by SSDs in production systems and how it is affected by various factors; the effectiveness of wear leveling; or the rate at which drives in the field use up their program erase (PE) cycle limit and what that means for the transition to future generations of flash with lower endurance. This paper presents the first large-scale field study of key operational characteristics of SSDs in production use based on a large population of enterprise storage systems covering almost 2 million SSDs of a major storage vendor (NetApp).