• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.289-297
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• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.11-18
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• 2021

The flash translation layer(FTL) of SSD maps the logical page number requested from the host to the actual recorded flash memory page number. It is very important to reduce the amount of RAM used to manage the mapping information. In the existing demand-based FTLs, two-level method is applied in which mapping information is also recorded in flash memory pages and only their addresses are managed as a table in RAM. As the capacities of SSDs are growing to tens of terabytes, the amount of RAM for mapping table becomes too large. In this paper, ML-FTL was proposed as a method of managing mapping information in three levels to reduce the amount of RAM required drastically. From an evaluation, the increase in overhead was minimal compared to the conventional two-level method by properly utilizing cache.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.521-531
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• 2009

Flash memory has physical characteristics different from hard disk where two costs of a read and write operations differ each other and an overwrite on flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to solve these restrictions with software, storage systems equipped with flash memory deploy FTL(Flash Translation Layer) software. Several FTL algorithms have been suggested so far and most of them prefer sequential write pattern to random write pattern. In this paper, we provide a new technique to efficiently store and maintain the B-tree index on flash memory. The operations like inserts, deletes, updates of keys for the B-tree generate random writes rather than sequential writes on flash memory, leading to inefficiency to the B-tree maintenance. In our technique, we convert random writes generated by the B-tree into sequential writes and then store them to the write-buffer on flash memory. If the buffer is full later, some sequential writes in the buffer will be issued to FTL. Our diverse experimental results show that our technique outperforms the existing ones with respect to the I/O cost of flash memory.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.12A no.3 s.93
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• pp.205-214
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• 2005

Flash memory is at high speed used as storage of personal information utilities, ubiquitous computing environments, mobile phones, electronic goods, etc. This is because flash memory has the characteristics of low electronic power, non-volatile storage, high performance, physical stability, portability, and so on. However, differently from hard disks, it has a weak point that overwrites on already written block of flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to make an overwrite possible, an erase operation on the written block should be performed before the overwrite, which lowers the performance of flash memory highly. In order to solve this problem the flash memory controller maintains a system software module called the flash translation layer(FTL). Of many proposed FTL schemes, the log block buffer scheme is best known so far. This scheme uses a small number of log blocks of flash memory as a write buffer, which reduces the number of erase operations by overwrites, leading to good performance. However, this scheme shows a weakness of low page usability of log blocks. In this paper, we propose an enhanced log block buffer scheme, FAST(Full Associative Sector Translation), which improves the page usability of each log block by fully associating sectors to be written by overwrites to the entire log blocks. We also show that our FAST scheme outperforms the log block buffer scheme.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.201-205
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• 2008

The flash memory is widely used as a main storage of embedded devices. It is adopted as a storage of database as growing the capacity of the flash memory. We run TPC-C benchmark on various FTL algorithms. But, the database shows poor performance on flash memory because the characteristic of I/O requests is full random. In this paper, we show the performance of all existing FTL algorithms is very poor. Especially, the FTL algorithm known as good at small mobile equipment shows worst performance. In addition, the chip-inter leaving which is a technique to improve the performance of the flash memory doesn't work well. In this paper, we inform you the reason that we need a new FTL algorithm and the direction for the database in the future.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.7B
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• pp.818-826
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• 2011

This paper proposes a novel FTL (Flash Translation Layer) algorithm employing sector-level mapping technique based on locality to reduce the number of erase operations in flash memory accesses. Sector-level mapping technique shows higher performance than other mapping techniques, even if it requires a large mapping table. The proposed algorithm reduces the size of mapping table by employing dynamic table update, processes sequential writes by exploiting sequential locality and extracts hot sector in random writes. Experimental results show that the number of erase operations has been reduced by 75.4%, 65.8%, and 10.3% respectively when compared with well-known BAST, FAST and sector mapping algorithms.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-22
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• 2010

As deployments of Flash memory are spreading out rapidly from tiny USB storages to large DB servers, interoperability become an indispensable requirement for Flash memory software architecture. For the purpose, many systems make use of the conventional FAT file system and FTL (Flash Translation Layer) software as a de facto standard. However, the tactless combination of the FAT file system and FTL does not satisfy diverse other requirements of a variety of systems. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable integrated Flash memory software architecture, named INFLAWARE (INtegrated FLAsh softWARE) that supports not only interoperability but also reconfigurability and performance enhancement. Real implementation based experimental results have shown that INFLAWARE can achieve improvements of memory footprint up to 27% with an average of 19%, compared with the conventional FAT and FTL combination. Also, by using map_destroy technique, it can reduce response times of various applications up to 21% with an average of 10%.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.7
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• pp.1-7
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• 2017

As the capacity of NAND flash module increases, the amount of RAM increases for caching and maintaining the FTL mapping information. In order to reduce the amount of mapping information managed in the RAM, a demand-based address mapping method stores the entire mapping information in the flash and some valid mapping information in the form of cache in the RAM so that the RAM can be used efficiently. However, when cache miss occurs, it is necessary to read the mapping information recorded in the flash, so overhead occurs to translate the address. If the RAM space is not enough, the cache hit ratio decreases, resulting in greater overhead. In this paper, we propose a method using two tables called TPMT(Translation Page Mapping Table) and SMT(Segmented Translation Page Mapping Table) to utilize both temporal locality and spatial locality more efficiently. A performance evaluation shows that this method can improve the cache hit ratio by up to 30% and reduces the extra translation operations by up to 72%, compared to the TPM scheme.

• 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.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.12B
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• pp.1418-1425
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• 2009

This paper proposes a novel FTL (Flash Translation Layer) algorithm based on sector-level mapping to reduce the number of total erase operations in flash memory accesses. The proposed algorithm can reduce the number of erase operations by utilizing the sector-level mapping table when writing data at flash memory. Sector-level mapping technique reduces flash memory access time and extendsthe life time of the flash memory. In the algorithm, wear-leveling is implemented by selecting victim blocks having the minimal number of erase operations, when empty spaces for write are not available. To evaluate the performance of the proposed FTL algorithm, experiments were performed on several applications, such as MP3 players, MPEG players, web browsers and document editors. The proposed algorithm reduces the number of erase operations by 72.4% and 61.9%, when compared with well-known BAST and FAST algorithms, respectively.