• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2009

Flash memory is widely used as a storage medium of mobile devices such as MP3 players, cellular phones and digital cameras due to its tiny size, low power consumption and shock resistant characteristics. Currently, there are many studies to replace HDD with flash memory because of its numerous strong points. To use flash memory as a storage medium, FTL(Flash Translation Layer) is required since flash memory has erase-before-write constraints and sizes of read/write unit and erase unit are different from each other. Recently, new type of flash memory called "large block flash memory" is introduced. The large block flash memory has different physical structure and characteristics from previous flash memory. So existing FTLs are not efficiently operated on large block flash memory. In this paper, we propose an efficient FTL for large block flash memory based on FAST(Fully Associative Sector Translation) scheme and page-level mapping on data blocks.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.9
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• pp.483-490
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• 2005

Recently, flash memory is widely used in embedded applications since it has strong points: non-volatility, fast access speed, shock resistance, and low power consumption. However, due to its hardware characteristics, it requires a software layer called FTL(flash translation layer). The main functionality of FTL is to convert logical addresses from the host to physical addresses of flash memory We present a new FTL algorithm called STAFF(State Transition Applied Fast Flash Translation Layer). Compared to the previous FTL algorithms, STAFF shows five times higher performance than basic block mapping scheme and requires less memory. We provide performance results based on our implementation of STAFF and previous FTL algorithms.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.476-487
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• 2007

Flash memory offers attractive features, such as non-volatile, shock resistance, fast access, and low power consumption for data storage. However, it has one main drawback of requiring an erase before updating the contents. Furthermore, flash memory can only be erased limited number of times. To overcome limitations, flash memory needs a software layer called flash translation layer (FTL). The basic function of FTL is to translate the logical address from the file system like file allocation table (FAT) to the physical address in flash memory. In this paper, a new FTL algorithm called an efficient and advanced space-management technique (EAST) is proposed. EAST improves the performance by optimizing the number of log blocks, by applying the state transition, and by using reallocation blocks. The results of experiments show that EAST outperforms FAST, which is an enhanced log block scheme, particularly when the usage of flash memory is not full.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.1-10
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• 2015

NAND flash systems require deletion operation and do not support in-place update, so the storage systems should use Flash Translation Layer (FTL). However, there are a lot of memory consumptions using mapping table in the FTL, so recently, many studies have been proposed to resolve mapping table overhead. These studies try to solve update propagation problem in the nand flash system which does not use mapping table. In this paper, we present a novel index structure, called CL-Tree(Cache List Tree), to solve the update propagation problem. The proposed index structure reduces write operations which occur for an update propagation, and it has a good performance for search operation because it uses multi-list structure. In experimental evaluation, we show that our scheme yields about 173% and 179% improvement in insertion speed and search speed, respectively, compared to traditional B+tree and other works.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.292-299
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• 2010

Recently, as flash memory is used as digital storage devices, necessity for digital forensics is growing in a flash memory area for digital evidence analysis. For this purpose, it is important to recover crashed files stored on flash memory efficiently. However, it is inefficient to apply the hard disk based file recovery techniques to flash memory, since hard disk and flash memory have different characteristics, especially flash memory being unable to in-place update. In this paper, we propose a flash-aware file recovery technique for digital forensics. First, we propose an efficient search technique to find all crashed files. This uses meta-data maintained by FTL(Flash Translation Layer) which is responsible for write operation in flash memory. Second, we advise an efficient recovery technique to recover a crashed file which uses data location information of the mapping table in FTL. Through diverse experiments, we show that our file recovery technique outperforms the hard disk based technique.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.18-29
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• 2008

NAND Flash memory has been growing popular storage device for the last years because of its low power consumption, fast access speed, shock resistance and light weight properties. However, it has the distinct characteristics such as erase-before-write architecture, asymmetric read/write/erase speed, and the limitation on the number of erasure per block. Due to these limitations, various Flash Translation Layers (FTLs) have been proposed to effectively use NAND flash memory. The systems that adopted the conventional FTL may result in severe performance degradation by the hot data which are frequently requested data for overwrite in the same logical address. In this paper, we propose a novel FTL algorithm called Adaptive Flash Translation Layer (AFTL) which uses sector mapping method for hot data and log-based block mapping method for cold data. Our system removes the redundant write operations and the erase operations by the separating hot data from cold data. Moreover, the read performance is enhanced according to sector translation that tends to use a few read operations. A series of experiments was organized to inspect the performance of the proposed method, and they show very impressive results.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.23-30
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• 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%.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.378-388
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• 2008

Flash memory has been attracting attention as the next mass storage media for mobile computing systems such as notebook computers and UMPC(Ultra Mobile PC)s due to its low power consumption, high shock and vibration resistance, and small size. A storage system with flash memory excels in random read, sequential read, and sequential write. However, it comes short in random write because of flash memory's physical inability to overwrite data, unless first erased. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an SSD(Solid State Disk) architecture with two novel features. First, we utilize non-volatile FRAM(Ferroelectric RAM) in conjunction with NAND flash memory, and produce a synergy of FRAM's fast access speed and ability to overwrite, and NAND flash memory's low and affordable price. Second, the architecture categorizes host write requests into small random writes and large sequential writes, and processes them with two different buffer management, optimized for each type of write request. This scheme has been implemented into an SSD prototype and evaluated with a standard PC environment benchmark. The result reveals that our architecture outperforms conventional HDD and other commercial SSDs by more than three times in the throughput for random access workloads.