• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
• /
• 제21권10호
• /
• pp.639-644
• /
• 2015

The capacity of flash-based storage such as Solid State Drive(SSD) and embedded Multi Media Card(eMMC) is ever-increasing because of the needs from the end-users. However, if a flash-based storage crashes, such as during power failure, the flash translation layer(FTL) is responsible for the crash recovery based on the entire flash memory. The recovery time increases as the capacity of the flash-based storages increases. We propose O1FTL with O(1) crash recovery time that is independent of the flash capacity. O1FTL adopts the working area technique suggested for the flash file system and evaluates the design on a real hardware platform. The results show that O1FTL achieves a crash recovery time that is independent of the capacity and the overhead, in terms of I/O performance, and achieves a low P/E cycle.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• 제15권8호
• /
• pp.23-30
• /
• 2010

Flash memory is non-volatile and can retain data even after system is powered off. Besides, it has many other features such as fast access speed, low power consumption, attractive shock resistance, small size, and light-weight. As its price decreases and capacity increases, the flash memory is expected to be widely used in consumer electronics, embedded systems, and mobile devices. Flash storage systems generally adopt a software layer, called FTL. In this research, we proposed a new FTL mechanism for overcoming the major drawback of conventional block mapping algorithm. In addition to the block mapping table, a index block mapping table with a small size is used to indicate sector location. The proposed indexed block mapping algorithm by adding a small size. By the simulation result, the proposed FTL provides an enhanced speed than a conventional hybrid mapping algorithm by around 45% in average, and the requirement of mapping memory is also reduced by around 12%.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
• /
• 제19D권2호
• /
• pp.161-186
• /
• 2012

Recently, the flash memory consistently increases the storage capacity while the price of the memory is being cheap. This makes the mass storage SSD(Solid State Drive) popular. The flash memory, however, has a lot of defects. In order that these defects should be complimented, it is needed to use the FTL(Flash Translation Layer) as a special layer. To operate restrictions of the hardware efficiently, the FTL that is essential to work plays a role of transferring from the logical sector number of file systems to the physical sector number of the flash memory. Especially, the poor performance is attributed to Erase-Before-Write among the flash memory's restrictions, and even if there are lots of studies based on the log block, a few problems still exists in order for the mass storage flash memory to be operated. If the FAST based on Log Block-Based Flash often is generated in the wide locality causing the random writing, the merge operation will be occur as the sectors is not used in the data block. In other words, the block thrashing which is not effective occurs and then, the flash memory's performance get worse. If the log-block makes the overwriting caused, the log-block is executed like a cache and this technique contributes to developing the flash memory performance improvement. This study for the improvement of the random writing demonstrates that the log block is operated like not only the cache but also the entire flash memory so that the merge operation and the erase operation are diminished as there are a distinct mapping table called as the offset mapping table for the operation. The new FTL is to be defined as the XAST(extensively-Associative Sector Translation). The XAST manages the offset mapping table with efficiency based on the spatial locality and temporal locality.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
• /
• 제34권2호
• /
• pp.109-118
• /
• 2007

Recently, flash memory is used to store data in mobile computing devices such as PDAs, SmartCards, mobile phones and MP3 players. These devices need index structures like the B-tree to efficiently support some operations like insertion, deletion and search. The BFTL(B-tree Flash Translation Layer) technique was first introduced which is for implementing the B-tree on flash memory. Flash memory has characteristics that a write operation is more costly than a read operation and an overwrite operation is impossible. Therefore, the BFTL method focuses on minimizing the number of write operations resulting from building the B-tree. However, we indicate in this paper that there are many rooms of improving the performance of the I/O cost in building the B-tree using this method and it is not practical since it increases highly the usage of the SRAM memory storage. In this paper, we propose a BOF(the B-tree On Flash memory) approach for implementing the B-tree on flash memory efficiently. The core of this approach is to store index units belonging to the same B-tree node to the same sector on flash memory in case of the replacement of the buffer used to build the B-tree. In this paper, we show that our BOF technique outperforms the BFTL or other techniques.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
• /
• 제15권11호
• /
• pp.836-840
• /
• 2009

Many researchers have studied flash memory in order to replace hard disk storages. Many FTL algorithms have been proposed to overcome physical constraints of flash memory such as erase-before-write, wear leveling, and poor write performance. Therefore, these constraints should be considered for testing FTL algorithms and the performance evaluation of flash memory. As doing the experiments, we suffer from several problems with costs and settings in experimental configuration. When we, for example, replay the traces of Oracle to evaluate the I/O performance with flash memory, it is hard to extract exact traces of I/O operations in Oracle. Since there are only write operations in the log, it is impossible to gather read operations. In MySQL and SQLite, we can gather the read operations by changing I/O functions in the source codes. But it is not easy to search for the exact points about I/O and even if we can find out the points, we might get wrong results depending on how we modify source codes to get I/O traces. The FlaSim proposed in this paper removes the difficulties when we evaluate the performance of FTL algorithms and flash memory. Our Linux drivers emulate the flash memory as a hard disk. And we can easily obtain the usage statistics of flash memory such as the number of write, read, and erase operations. The FlaSim can be gracefully extended to support the additional modules implemented by novel algorithms and ideas. In this paper, we describe the structure of FTL emulator, development tools and operating methods. We expect this emulator to be helpful for many experiments and research with flash memory.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
• /
• 한국정보과학회 2007년도 한국컴퓨터종합학술대회논문집 Vol.34 No.1 (A)
• /
• pp.21-22
• /
• 2007

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
• /
• 제13권3호
• /
• pp.109-116
• /
• 2018

SSDs that are not allowed in-place update within the allocated page cause another allocation of a new page that will replace the previous page at the moment data modification occurs. This intrinsic characteristic of SSDs requires many changes to the existing HDD-based IO theory. In this paper, we conduct a performance comparison of FTL caching strategy in perspective of cache hashing (Global vs. grouped) and caching algorithm (LRU vs. NUR) through a simulation. Experimental results show that in terms of energy consumption for flash operation the grouped management of cache is not suitable and NUR algorithm is superior to LRU algorithm. In particular, we found that the cache hit ratio of LRU algorithm is about 10% point higher than that of NUR algorithm while the energy consumption of LRU algorithm is about 32% high.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
• /
• 제15권6호
• /
• pp.289-297
• /
• 2020

Although flash disks are being used widely instead of hard disks, it is difficult to optimize for effective utilization of flash disks because overwrite in place is impossible and the power consumption and time required for read, write, and erase operations are all different. One of these optimization issues is a cache management strategy to minimize write operations. The cache operates at two levels: an operating system equipped with flash disks and a translation layer within the flash disk. Most studies deal with the operating system-level cache strategy. In this study, we implement and analyse the DPW-LRU algorithm which is one of the recently proposed operating system cache replacement algorithms to apply to FTL, and grope with some improvements. As a result of the experiment, the DPW-LRU algorithm maintained superiority even in the FTL environment, and showed better performance with a slight improvement.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• 제41권10호
• /
• pp.1167-1175
• /
• 2016

This paper proposes an efficient page-level mapping algorithm that reduces the erase count in the FTL for flash memory systems. By maintaining the weight for each write request in the request buffer, the proposed algorithm estimates the degree of temporal locality for each incoming write request. To exploit temporal locality deliberately for determination of hot request, the degree of temporal locality should be much higher than the reference point determined experimentally. While previous LRU algorithm treats a new write request to have high temporal locality, the proposed algorithm allows write requests that are estimated to have high temporal locality to access hot blocks to store hot data intensively. The pages are more frequently updated in hot blocks than warm blocks. A hot block that has most of invalid pages is always selected as victim block at Garbage Collection, which results in delayed erase operation and in reduced erase count. Experimental results show that erase count is reduced by 9.3% for real I/O workloads, when compared to the previous LRU algorithm.