• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid wear leveling technique for NAND Flash memory, called Time-Aware Wear Leveling (TAWL). Our proposal prolongs the lifetime of NAND Flash memory by using dynamic wear leveling technique which considers the wear level of hot blocks as well as static wear leveling technique which considers the wear level of the whole blocks. TAWL also reduces the overhead of garbage collection by separating hot data and cold data using update frequency rate. We showed that TAWL enhanced the lifetime of NAND flash memory up to 220% compared with previous wear leveling techniques and our technique also reduced the number of copy operations of garbage collections by separating hot and cold data up to 45%.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.126-131
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• 2015

As flash-based storage systems have been actively employed in large-scale servers and data centers, reliability has become an indispensable element. One promising technique for enhancing reliability is static wear-leveling, which distributes erase operations evenly among blocks so that the lifespan of storage systems can be prolonged. However, increasing the capacity makes the processing overhead of this technique non-trivial, mainly due to searching for blocks whose erase count would be minimum (or maximum) among all blocks. To reduce this overhead, we introduce a new randomized block selection method in static wear-leveling. Specifically, without exhaustive search, it chooses n blocks randomly and selects the maximal/minimal erased blocks among the chosen set. Our experimental results revealed that, when n is 2, the wear-leveling effects can be obtained, while for n beyond 4, the effect is close to that obtained from traditional static wear-leveling. For quantitative evaluation of the processing overhead, the scheme was actually implemented on an FPGA board, and overhead reduction of more than 3 times was observed. This implies that the proposed scheme performs as effectively as the traditional static wear-leveling while reducing overhead.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.181-185
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• 2014

The lifetime of a solid-state drive (SSD) is limited because of the number of program and erase cycles allowed on its NAND flash blocks. Data cannot be overwritten in an SSD, leading to an out-of-place update every time the data are modified. This result in two copies of the data: the original copy and a modified copy. This phenomenon is known as write amplification and adversely affects the endurance of the memory. In this study, we address the issue of reducing wear leveling through efficient handling of write requests. This results in even wearing of all the blocks, thereby increasing the endurance period. The focus of our work is to logically divert the write requests, which are concentrated to limited blocks, to the less-worn blocks and then measure the maximum number of write requests that the memory can handle. A memory without the proposed algorithm wears out prematurely as compared to that with the algorithm. The main feature of the proposed algorithm is to delay out-of-place updates till the threshold is reached, which results in a low overhead. Further, the algorithm increases endurance by a factor of the threshold level multiplied by the number of blocks in the memory.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.185-192
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• 2017

Due to the characteristics of low power, high durability and high density, NAND flash memory is being heavily used in various type of devices such as USB, SD card, smart phone and SSD. On the other hand, because of another characteristic of flash cell with the limited number of program/erase cycles, NAND flash memory has a short lifetime compared to other storage devices. To overcome the lifetime problem, many researches related to the wear leveling have been conducted. This paper presents a method called a TCB (Tracking Cold Blocks) using more reinforced constraint conditions when classifying cold blocks than previous works. TCB presented in this paper keeps a MCT (Migrated Cold block Table) to manage the enhanced classification process of cold blocks, with which unnecessary migrations of pages can be reduced much more. Through the experiments, we show that TCB reduces the overhead of wear leveling by about 30% and increases the lifetime up to about 60% compared to BET and BST.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2012.11a
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• pp.24-26
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• 2012

데이터 저장장치로 널리 사용되고 있는 플래시 메모리의 블록들은 소거 횟수가 제한되어 있어서 특정 블록에 소거 동작이 집중되지 않도록 마모 균등화 기능을 제공해야 한다. 저장 장치의 데이터들은 주기적으로 갱신이 자주 되는 hot데이터와 갱신이 거의 일어나지 않는 cold 데이터로 구성된다. 이런 두 가지 타입의 데이터로 인해 발생하는 소거 횟수에 대한 편차를 줄이기 위하여 정적 마모 균등화 기법을 사용하는데 데이터 이동에 따른 추가적인 소거 동작이 발생하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 데이터 이동 결정을 위한 임계값을 제어하여 플래시 메모리 내의 전체 블록들의 평균 소거 횟수가 크지 않을 때는 마모 균등화 작업을 자주 발생하지 않게 하고, 평균 소거 횟수가 소거 허용 한계치에 점차 근접하면 설정된 임계값으로 동작하도록 하여 정적 마모 평준화에 의해 추가되는 소거 횟수를 효율적으로 감소시키는 방법을 제안한다.