HotR: Alleviating Read/Write Interference with Hot Read Data Replication for Flash Storage

The read/write interference problem of flash storage remains a critical concern under workloads with a mixture of read and write requests. To significantly improve the read performance in face of read/write interference, we propose a Hot Data Replication scheme for flash storage, called HotR. HotR utilizes the asymmetric read and write performance characteristics of flash-based SSDs and outsources the popular read data to a surrogate space such as a dedicated spare flash chip or an over-provisioned space within an SSD. By servicing some conflicted read requests on the surrogate flash space, HotR can alleviate, if not entirely eliminate, the contention between the read requests and the on-going write requests. The evaluation results show that HotR improves the state-of-the-art scheme in the system performance and cost efficiency significantly. Consequently, the tail-latency of the flash-based storage systems is also reduced.