Automatic-SSD: Full Hardware Automation over New Memory for High Performance and Energy Efficient PCIe Storage Cards

We propose Automatic-SSD that converts all storage management logic into hardware, which enable energy efficient, high performance fast memory based block storage. To achieve low operating power, Automatic-SSD directly reads or writes host-side data to underlying backend storage media without internal DRAM caches. To realize such DRAM-less approach with better performance and make it more energy efficient, Automatic-SSD also removes the internal processor(s) and firmware execution therein by fully automating the backend request management and data transfers over all pipelined hardware modules. We prototype Automatic-SSD on a middle-end FPGA custom board, employing massive numbers of phase change memories as representative of new memory technologies. Our evaluation results show that, compared to a conventional firmware-based approach, Automatic-SSD shows up 28.8× and 25.4× better bandwidth and latency behaviors, respectively, while consuming only 5% of the total energy, on overage.