Quantitative study of Solid State Disks for mass storage

A quantitative study of Solid State Disks (SSD) for mass storage is performed using a well established storage simulator, extended to handle SSD components. The study considers various IO profiles representing a wide range of applications. We focus on four IO parameters, split into 2 categories: hardware configuration and access operations. The first category covers the Flash chips types and how they are assembled to build the SSD. The second category deals with the variation of the generated IO operations (size, type). The obtained results give a precise idea of the capabilities of such storage devices and can be used as guidelines for efficient SSD based systems design and effective access patterns delivering a maximum throughput.