• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.94-101
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• 2013

The market for NAND flash-based storage devices has grown significantly as they rapidly replace traditional disk-based storage devices. Heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices using both multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memories are also actively researched since both types of memories complement each other. Heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices suffer from the overheads incurred by migration from SLC to MLC and garbage collection of SLC. This paper proposes a new flash translation layer (FTL) for heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices to reduce the overheads by utilizing SLC efficiently. The proposed FTL analyzes the access patterns of logical blocks and selects and stores only logical blocks expected to bring performance improvement in SLC. The experimental results show that the total execution time of heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices with our proposed FTL scheme is 35% shorter than that with the previously proposed best FTL scheme.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.9-15
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• 2017

This paper presents an efficient FTL for NAND flash based SSDs. Address translation information of page mapping based FTLs is stored on flash memory pages and address translation cache keeps frequently accessed entries. The proposed FTL of this paper reduces response time by considering both of temporal and spacial localities of page access patterns in translation cache management. The localities of several well-known traces are evaluated and determine the structure of the cache for high hit ratio. A simulation with several well-known traces shows that the presented FTL reduces response time in comparison to previous FTLs and can be used with relatively small size of caches.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.828-831
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• 2008

플래시 메모리(Flash Memory) 기술이 빠르게 발전하면서, 플래시 메모리 기반의 저장 장치가 개인용 컴퓨터나 엔터프라이즈 서버 시스템과 같은 시스템에 2차적인 저장 장치로써 사용가능해지고 있다. FTL(Flash Translation Layer)의 기본적인 기능은 플래시 메모리의 논리 주소를 물리 주소로 바꾸는 것임에도 불구하고, FTL의 효율적인 알고리즘은 성능과 수명에 상당한 효과를 가지고 있다. 이 논문에서는 MP3 플레이어와 디지털 카메라, SSDs(Solid-State Disk)와 같은 낸드 플래시 메모리(NAND Flash Memory) 기반의 어플리케이션을 위한 N : N+K 매핑을 사용하는 새로운 FTL 설계를 제안한다. 성능에 영향을 미치는 매개변수들을 분류하여, 다양한 워크로드 분석을 기반으로 FTL을 조사했다. 우리가 제안하는 FTL을 가지고, 낸드 플래시 어플리케이션 가동에 따라 어떤 매개변수가 최대 성능을 낼 수 있는지 알아낼 수 있고, 그 변수들을 유연하게 조정하여 성능을 더 향상시킬 수 있다.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.142-150
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• 2021

Open-channel SSD is a new type of Solid-State Disk (SSD) that improves the garbage collection overhead and write amplification due to physical constraints of NAND flash memory by exposing the internal structure of the SSD to the host. However, the host-level Flash Translation Layer (FTL) provided for open-channel SSDs in the current Linux kernel consumes host memory excessively because it use page-level mapping table to translate logical address to physical address. Therefore, in this paper, we implemente a selective mapping table loading scheme that loads only a currently required part of the mapping table to the mapping table cache from SSD instead of entire mapping table. In addition, to increase the hit ratio of the mapping table cache, filesystem information and mapping table access history are utilized for cache replacement policy. The proposed scheme is implemented in the host-level FTL of the Linux kernel and evaluated using open-channel SSD emulator. According to the evaluation results, we can achieve 80% of I/O performance using the only 32% of memory usage compared to the previous host-level FTL.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.27-35
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• 2021

NAND flash memory-based SSD needs an internal software, Flash Translation Layer(FTL) to provide traditional block device interface to the host because of its physical constraints, such as erase-before-write and large erase block. However, because useful host-side information cannot be delivered to FTL through the narrow block device interface, SSDs suffer from a variety of problems such as increasing garbage collection overhead, large tail-latency, and unpredictable I/O latency. Otherwise, the new type of SSD, open-channel SSD exposes the internal structure of SSD to the host so that underlying NAND flash memory can be managed directly by the host-level FTL. Especially, I/O data classification by using host-side information can achieve the reduction of garbage collection overhead. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to reduce garbage collection overhead of open-channel SSD by separating the journal from other file data for the journaling filesystem. Because journal has different lifespan with other file data, the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) caused by garbage collection can be reduced. The proposed scheme is implemented by modifying the host-level FTL of Linux and evaluated with both Fio and Filebench. According to the experiment results, the proposed scheme improves I/O performance by 46%~50% while reducing the WAF of open-channel SSDs by more than 33% compared to the previous one.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.213-225
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• 2007

Flash memory is widely used as a storage device for potable equipments such as digital cameras, MP3 players and cellular phones because of its characteristics such as its large volume and nonvolatile feature, low power consumption, and good performance. However, a block in flash memories should be erased to write because of its hardware characteristic which is called as erase-before-write architecture. The erase operation is much slower than read or write operations. FTL is used to overcome this problem. We compared the performance of the existing FTL algorithms on Windows-based OS. We have developed a tool called FTL APAT in order to gather I/O patterns of the disk and analyze the performance of the FTL algorithms. It is the log buffer scheme with full associative sector translation(FAST) that the performance is best.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.463-475
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• 2009

Flash memory is suitable for real time systems because of its consistent performance for random access, low power consumption and shock resistance. However, flash memory needs blocking time to perform a garbage collection to reclaim invalidated pages. Moreover, the worst-case garbage collection time is significantly longer than the best-case garbage collection time. In this paper, we propose a FTL (Flash Translation Layer) mapping scheme called KAST (K-Associative Sector Translation). In the KAST scheme, user can control the maximum association of the log block to limit the worst-case garbage collection time. Performance evaluation using simulation shows that not only KAST completes the garbage collection within the specified time but also provides about 10~15% better average performance than existing FTL schemes.

• 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.11
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• pp.31-38
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• 2015

Nowadays, large size flash memory drives with more than a couple of hundreds of gigabytes are common. This paper presents an efficient cache management scheme of flash translation layer, called TPC-FTL, for large size flash memory drives. Since flash drives of large size usually contain large size RAM, we can enhance the performance of page mapping cache by using more RAM for the cache. But if the size exceeds a threshold, the existing schemes are impractical for real devices, because the time for cache manipulation becomes too long. TPC-FTL manages the cache in translation page unit, not in logical page number unit used in existing schemes. Since a translation page covers a large number of logical page numbers (for example, 512 for 2KB size page), the number of cache elements can be reduced up to a practical level. A performance evaluation shows that average response time, an important performance measure, is better than existing schemes via the effect of utilizing spacial locality in addition to temporal locality.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2012

SSDs(Solid State Drives) have many attractive features such as high performance, low power consumption, shock resistance, and low weight, so they replace HDDs to a certain extent. An SSD has FTL(Flash Translation Layer) which emulate block storage devices like HDDs. A garbage collection, one of major functions of FTL, effects highly on the performance and the lifetime of SSDs. However, there is no de facto standard for new garbage collection algorithms. To solve this problem, we propose trace driven offline optimal algorithms for garbage collection of FTL. The proposed algorithm always guarantees minimal number of erase operation. In addition, we verify our proposed algorithm using TPC trace.