Cold Data Identification using Raw Bit Error Rate in Wear Leveling for NAND Flash Memory

Wear leveling techniques have been studied to prolong the lifetime of NAND flash memory. Most of studies have used Program/Erase(P/E) cycles as wear index for wear leveling. Unfortunately, P/E cycles could not predict the real lifetime of NAND flash blocks. Therefore, these algorithms have the limited performance from prolonging the lifetime when applied to the SSD. In order to apply the real lifetime, wear leveling algorithms, which use raw Bit Error Rate(rBER) as wear index, have been studied in recent years. In this paper, we propose CrEWL(Cold data identification using raw Bit error rate in Wear Leveling), which uses rBER as wear index to apply to the real lifetime. The proposed wear leveling reduces an overhead of garbage collections by using HBSQ(Hot Block Sequence Queue) which identifies hot data. In order to reduce overhead of wear leveling, CrEWL does not perform wear leveling until rBER of the some blocks reaches a threshold value. We evaluate CrEWL in comparison with the previous studies under the traces having the different Hot/Cold rate, and the experimental results show that our wear leveling technique can reduce the overhead up to 41% and prolong the lifetime up to 72% compared with previous wear leveling techniques.