An Empirical Evaluation of NVM Express SSD

Emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technology with high throughput and scalability has considerable attraction in cloud and enterprise storage systems. The industry and academic communities made the NVMe specification to elicit the highest performance on NVM devices. While the technology is commercially viable, it is important to consider the performance of NVM devices with NVMe specification according to different I/O configurations and analyze workloads on the storage to exploit better performance. This paper presents the features and results of our performance study on a recent NVM express solid state drive (NVMe SSD) developed by Samsung electronics. It is a flash-based PCIe attached SSD built to follow NVMe specification. The maximum throughput is 2.5GB/s and 800MB/s for reading and writing 4KB, respectively. We analyze the performance of NVMe SSD in terms of different performance metrics with microbenchmarks and database workloads.