AERO: Adaptive Erase Operation for Improving Lifetime and Performance of Modern NAND Flash-Based SSDs

This work investigates a new erase scheme in NAND flash memory to improve the lifetime and performance of modern solid-state drives (SSDs). In NAND flash memory, an erase operation applies a high voltage (e.g., > 20 V) to flash cells for a long time (e.g., > 3.5 ms), which degrades cell endurance and potentially delays user I/O requests. While a large body of prior work has proposed various techniques to mitigate the negative impact of erase operations, no work has yet investigated how erase latency should be set to fully exploit the potential of NAND flash memory; most existing techniques use a fixed latency for every erase operation which is set to cover the worst-case operating conditions. To address this, we propose Aero (Adaptive ERase Operation), a new erase scheme that dynamically adjusts erase latency to be just long enough for reliably erasing target cells, depending on the cells' current erase characteristics. Aero accurately predicts such near-optimal erase latency based on the number of fail bits during an erase operation. To maximize its benefits, we further optimize Aero in two aspects. First, at the beginning of an erase operation, Aero attempts to erase the cells for a short time (e.g., 1 ms), which enables Aero to always obtain the number of fail bits necessary to accurately predict the near-optimal erase latency. Second, Aero aggressively yet safely reduces erase latency by leveraging a large reliability margin present in modern SSDs. We demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of Aero using 160 real 3D NAND flash chips, showing that it enhances SSD lifetime over the conventional erase scheme by 43% without change to existing NAND flash chips. Our system-level evaluation using eleven real-world workloads shows that an AERO-enabled SSD reduces read tail latency by 34% on average over a state-of-the-art technique.