MGC: Multiple-Gray-Code for 3D NAND Flash based High-Density SSDs

QLC (4-bit-per-cell) and more-bit-per-cell 3D NAND flash memories are increasingly adopted in large storage systems. While achieving significant cost reduction, these memories face degraded performance and reliability issues. The industry has adopted two-step programming (TSP), rather than one-step programming, to perform fine-granularity program control and choose gray-code encoding, as well as LDPC (Low-Density Parity-Check Code) for error correction. Different flash manufacturers often integrate different gray-codes in their products, which exhibit different performance and reliability characteristics. Unfortunately, a fixed gray-code encoding design lacks the ability to meet the dynamic read and program performance requirements at both application and device levels.In this paper, we propose MGC, a multiple-gray-code encoding strategy, that adaptively chooses the best gray-code to meet the optimization goals at runtime. In particular, MGC first extracts the performance and reliability requirements based on application-level access patterns and detects the reliability degree of SSD. It then determines the appropriate gray-code to encode the data, either from host/user application or due to garbage collection, before writing the pages to the flash memory. MGC is integrated in FTL (flash translation layer) and enhances the flash controller to enable runtime gray-code arbitration. We evaluate the proposed MGC scheme. The results show that MGC achieves better performance and lifetime guarantee compared with state-of-the-arts and introduces little overhead.