Chapter One - A comprehensive survey of issues in solid state drives.

Flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) have become ubiquitous in modern computing systems, such as high-performance servers, workstation, desktops, and laptops, due to their performance and density. The architecture of SSDs has evolved to exploit the advantages of flash memories and at the same time conceal their shortcomings. SSD concurrency techniques such as channel striping, flash-chip pipelining, die interleaving, and plane sharing utilize the available parallelism of flash memories, while the flash translation layer (FTL) operations minimize the latency overhead of flash memories. This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of SSD topics that span across from the physical properties of a flash memory cell to the architecture of SSDs. The FTL-related topics are discussed in the context of inter-related system-level operations, which include address mapping, garbage collection, wear leveling, bad block management, SSD concurrency techniques, and page allocation strategies. This chapter also surveys recent research efforts on SSDs.