Prof. Dr. Frank Bellosa
Peter Maucher
Thorsten Gröninger

Abstract
In the last decade, NVMe SSDs have become the standard medium for high performance storage. Despite their ubiquity, their internal workings are poorly understood and guidance for efficient use of SSDs is lacking [1]. In this work, we develop a benchmarking suite based on xNVMe [2] capable of reporting individual request latencies, and use it to analyze performance characteristics of multiple consumer NVMe SSDs in variety of synthetic benchmarks. This leads to the discovery of several cases of pathological SSD performance in simple workloads. We issue general guidance for performant SSD use and conclude that the devices tested implement few optimizations and perform vastly different to what their specifications would suggest.

BibTex:

@bachelorthesis{bohner25NVMe SSD Performance Characteristics,
  author = {Peter Simon Bohner},
  title = {What does the Flash Translation Layer do? Exploring Modern NVMe SSD Performance Characteristics},
  type = {Bachelor Thesis},
  year = 2025,
  month = jun# "06",
  school = {Operating Systems Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany}
  }