Experimental Study on System-Level Performance Impact of Read Disturbance in Modern SSDs

This work investigates the system-level performance impact of read disturbance in modern NAND flash-based SSDs, aiming to provide new insights that can help develop better storage architectures and optimize system software. Continuous improvement in storage density over decades has led NAND flash memory to play a vital role in modern computing systems, but it also comes at a cost of significant reliability degradation. Among various error sources, read disturbance has gained growing attention as a major reliability concern due to its rapidly increasing impact, which can significantly affect system I/O performance by exacerbating SSD-internal reliability-management overheads. Although a large body of prior work has focused on device-level characterizations and optimizations, the system-level performance impact of read disturbance still remains largely uninvestigated. To address this gap, this work conducts a rigorous experimental study using 15 modern NVMe SSDs from 10 major vendors in two ways. First, we comprehensively analyze the system-level performance impact of read disturbance under diverse workloads and operating conditions. Second, to highlight the importance of efficient read-disturbance management, we showcase a new possible SSD-performance attack as a case study, demonstrating that an adversary can significantly degrade the I/O performance of other concurrently running processes by exploiting read disturbance alone in commodity SSDs. Based on our experimental study, we make 16 new observations and 7 takeaway lessons, which lead to 6 key directions for future improvements at the host-system and SSD-architecture levels to better cope with read disturbance.