Abstract: In recent years, solid state drives (SSDs) have witnessed rapid development towards higher bandwidth and larger capacity. To expand SSD capacity, the size of flash memory pages has increased from 4 KB to 16 KB. However, operating systems still issue read/write requests to SSDs with a 4 KB memory page granularity, making it difficult for applications to fully utilize the high bandwidth of SSDs. Increasing the size of memory pages to align the granularity of I/O requests issued by the operating system with the SSD's flash memory read/write operations could be a potential solution. This  paper delves into the effects of memory page size on system I/O performance and SSD lifetime for the first time, including setting the memory page size to 16 KB, running benchmark tests, and comparing the results with those obtained using 4 KB memory pages. The key findings are as follows: (1) 16 KB memory pages exhibit better read performance; (2) the write granularity of applications determines the performance of 16 KB memory pages; (3) 16 KB memory pages amplify the impact of invalid data within pages on SSD lifetime.

Key words: solid state drive, high-density flash, memory management, memory page size, I/O performance test and analysis