Sites: and Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.įor the last decade, almost solid-state drives (SSDs) have included dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in their controller to improve input/output (I/O) performance and endurance. It was also supported by the National Research Foundation of Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning of Korea under Grant 2017R1A2B4008536. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript.įunding: The present Research has been conducted by the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2019. Received: JAccepted: FebruPublished: March 2, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Kim, Kim. PLoS ONE 15(3):Įditor: Rashid Mehmood, King Abdulaziz University, SAUDI ARABIA
Through extensive experiments, we conclude that DRAM-less SSDs evaluated in this study mainly exploit the host memory buffer as an address mapping table cache rather than a read cache or write buffer to improve I/O performance.Ĭitation: Kim K, Kim T (2020) HMB in DRAM-less NVMe SSDs: Their usage and effects on performance. We also present methods that reveal how the host memory buffer is used in commercial DRAM-less SSDs to improve I/O performance. In this paper, we show that commercial DRAM-less SSDs clearly exhibit worse I/O performance than SSDs with internal DRAM, but this can be improved by using the HMB feature. However, this problem can be alleviated by using host memory buffer (HMB) feature of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), which allows SSDs to utilize the DRAM of host. Obviously, their performance is lower than conventional SSDs because they cannot exploit advantages of DRAM in the controller.
Solid-state drives (SSDs) that do not have internal dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) are being widely spread for client SSD and embedded SSD markets in recent years because they are cheap and consume less power.