A Case Study: Performance Evaluation of a DRAM-Based Solid State Disk

The speed gap between processors and hard disk drives (HDDs) has been spreading at a faster speed than the gap between processors and main memory devices. The most adopted methods for reducing this speed gap are caching and widening the datapath (such as striping a file into multiple disks). Solid state disks (SSDs) are data storage devices that look like (ordinary) magnetic hard disk drives to the programs but are actually made of the same semiconductor devices and therefore are much faster than HDDs. In this paper, we present a case study of evaluating a DRAM-based SSD with OLTP workload which has a high bandwidth requirement and is write-intensive. We also discuss the suitable ways of using the SSD by taking its advantages and disadvantages.