SpartanSSD: a Reliable SSD under Capacitance Constraints

In this paper, we present an SSD design that is resilient to sudden power-off failures. Modern SSDs use a large number of capacitors that act as energy reserves to persist both host data and SSD metadata in the unforeseen event of a power outage. However, these capacitors take up a large footprint that limits the SSD’s density. We present a series of design choices that significantly reduce the SSD’s dependence on capacitors, all the while meeting the durability, consistency, and power-on time constraints. We demonstrate that at a modest performance overhead of 11%, the amount of required capacitance is reduced by 97.87%.