Buddhanoy, Matchima, authorPasricha, Sudeep, authorRay, Biswajit, authorACM, publisher2024-11-112024-11-112024-07-08Matchima Buddhanoy, Sudeep Pasricha, and Biswajit Ray. 2024. Life-after-Death: Exploring Thermal Annealing Conditions to Enhance 3D NAND SSD Endurance. In 16th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HOTSTORAGE '24), July 8–9, 2024, Santa Clara, CA, USA. ACM, Santa Clara, CA, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3655038.3665949https://hdl.handle.net/10217/239528In this paper, we evaluate thermal annealing effects on the endurance of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) 3D NAND flash memory beyond its end-of-life. We systematically evaluate the effects of anneal duration, anneal temperature, and state of the memory cells during annealing on the endurance enhancement. Interestingly, we find that endurance enhancement critically depends on the state of flash memory cells during annealing, with programmed cells showing significantly larger improvements than erased cells. Our experimental evaluation indicates that the post-cycle data retention property of an annealed chip significantly improves after thermal annealing, resulting in ∼30% endurance recovery. Our results have significant implications for the future wear-leveling algorithms of SSD-based storage systems.born digitalarticleseng© Matchima Buddhanoy, et al. | ACM 2024. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in HOTSTORAGE '24, https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3655038.3665949.flash memories3D NANDannealingTexthttps://doi.org/10.1145/3655038.3665949