Impact of the NAND Flash Power Supply on Solid State Drives Reliability and Performance

The NAND Flash memory technology is the fundamental building block of storage systems like Solid State Drives. Their reliability drastically impacts the design choices of the error recovery flows exploited to improve drive’s performance, which progressively degrades as the number of bit errors to be corrected increases. Among the many causes producing errors, it is found that the NAND Flash power supply plays a non-negligible role. In this paper we will show how the drive’s performance degradation rate measured by the sustainable bandwidth, read latency, and quality of service metrics, heavily depends on the power supply. The results will show that by using a lower power supply in endeavor to reduce the energy consumption of the drive will yield a significant bandwidth (up to 44.4 kIOPS), latency (up to 504 μs), and quality-of-service (up to 1.5 ms) detriment. Counterintuitively, we will show that the overall energy consumption per byte will increase (up to 4.5 times) in specific working conditions of the drive.