Investigation on Radiation Effects of White Neutron Source on COTS Solid-State Drives

Commercial solid-state drives (SSDs) were subjected to broad-spectrum neutron exposure at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) to analyze radiation-induced errors in components and functional interruptions in non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) SSDs. The experiments revealed apparent sensitivity differences, with NVMe SSDs demonstrating better resistance at the module level due to advanced controller technology and enhanced error correction capabilities than SATA SSDs. For NVMe SSDs, functional interruptions were primarily identified as <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">nand</small> Flash faults, such as timeouts, and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) errors, such as stuck bits, while controller vulnerabilities contributed minimally. Moreover, this article examines the dominance of read errors as the primary failure mode in <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">nand</small> Flash and explores how the cumulative characteristic of these errors correlates with functional interruptions.