An Empirical Study of Quad-Level Cell (QLC) NAND Flash SSDs for Big Data Applications

As the SSD technology develops, quad-level cell (QLC) NAND based SSD is gradually being introduced to the market. And as such, we evaluate the QLC technologys impact on the landscape of modern datacenters. Since a large number of applications and workloads in the modern datacenters have far more read requests than they write requests, QLC SSD provides a promising solution. For example, real-time analytics and big data, machine and deep learning, and read-intensive AI applications are all read hungry perfectly suited for the QLC. Its favorable performance (especially in reads), high capacity and density greatly help modern datacenters to provide more efficient services to their customers. At the same time, the low cost of QLC SSD also helps to lower the cost of operation for datacenters. Additionally, we explore the state-of-art QLC SSD from the system architecture point of view to shows its key advancements from previous technologies. By conducting a comprehensive performance evaluation of QLC SSD, we are able to compare it with other types of SSD and analyze factors that impact its performance.