• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.25-32
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• 2017

Recently, the use of NAND flash memory is being increased as a secondary device to displace conventional magnetic disk. NAND flash memory, as one among non-volatile memories, has many advantages such as low power, high reliability, low access latency, and so on. However, NAND flash memory has disadvantages such as erase-before-write, unbalanced operation speed, and limited P/E cycles, unlike conventional magnetic disk. To solve these problems, NAND flash memory mainly adopted FTL (Flash Translation Layer). In particular, garbage collection technique in FTL tried to improve the system lifetime. However, previous garbage collection techniques have a sensitive property of the system lifetime according to write pattern. To solve this problem, we propose BSGC (Balanced Selection-based Garbage Collection) technique. BSGC efficiently selects a victim block using all intervals from the past information to the current information. In this work, SFL (Search First linked List), as the proposed block allocation policy, prolongs the system lifetime additionally. In our experiments, SFL and BSGC prolonged the system lifetime about 12.85% on average and reduced page migrations about 22.12% on average. Moreover, SFL and BSGC reduced the average response time of 16.88% on average.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.17-20
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• 2011

NAND 플래시 메모리 기반의 저장장치의 내부에는 Flash Translation Layer (FTL)이라는 소프트웨어가 사용되고 있다. FTL은 파일 시스템으로부터 요청되는 논리 주소를 플래시 메모리의 물리 주소로 변환하며 이를 위하여 사상 테이블을 사용한다. 일반적으로 사상 테이블의 빠른 접근을 위하여 사상 테이블은 저장장치 내부의 RAM에 유지한다. 최근 저장 공간의 용량이 커지게 되면서 사상 테이블로 인해 요구되는 RAM의 크기도 커지게 되어 사상 테이블을 플래시 메모리에 저장하고 일부만 RAM에 유지하는 캐싱 기법들이 연구되어 왔다. 본 논문에서는 SAT-c 라는 사상 테이블 캐싱 기법을 제안하고 캐시 교체 알고리즘들의 성능을 비교하였다.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.17D no.6
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• pp.383-394
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• 2010

Flash memory based SSDs are currently being considered as a promising candidate for replacing hard disks due to several superior features such as shorter access time, lower power consumption and better shock resistance. However, SSDs have different characteristics from hard disk such as difference of unit and time for read, write and erase operation and impossibility for over-writing. Because of these reasons, SSDs have disadvantages on hard disk based systems, so FTL(Flash Translation Layer) is designed to increase SSDs' efficiency. In this paper, we propose an advanced logical address mapping method for increasing SSDs' performance, which is named HAMM(Hybrid Address Mapping Method). HAMM addresses drawbacks of previous block-mapping method and super-block-mapping method and takes advantages of them. We experimented our method on our own SSDs simulator. In the experiments, we confirmed that HAMM uses storage area more efficiently than super-block-mapping method, given the same buffer size. In addition, HAMM used smaller memory than block-mapping method to construct mapping table, demonstrating almost same performance.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.215-222
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• 2013

NAND flash memory-based Solid State Drives (SSD) have lots of merits compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDD). However, random write in SSD is still far slower than sequential read/write and random read. There are two independent approaches to resolve this problem: 1) using part of the flash memory blocks as log blocks, and 2) using internal write buffer (DRAM or Non-Volatile RAM) in SSD. While log blocks are managed by the Flash Translation Layer (FTL), write buffer management has been treated separately from FTL. Write buffer management schemes did not use the exact status of log blocks and log block management schemes in FTL did not consider the behavior of write buffer management scheme. In this paper, we first show that log blocks and write buffer have a tight relationship to each other, which necessitates integrated management of both of them. Since log blocks also can be viewed as another type of write buffer, we can manage both of them as an integrated write buffer. Then we provide three design criteria for the integrated write buffer management scheme which can be very useful to SSD firmware designers.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.78-87
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• 2013

NAND flash memory has been widely used as a storage medium in mobile devices, PCs, and workstations due to its advantages such as low power consumption, high performance, and random accessability compared to a hard disk drive. However, NAND flash cannot support in-place update so that it is mandatory to erase the entire block before overwriting the corresponding page. In order to overcome this drawback, flash storages need a software support, named Flash Translation Layer. However, as the high performance mass NAND flash memory is getting widely used, the size of mapping tables is increasing more than the limited DRAM size. In this paper, we propose an adaptive mapping information caching algorithm based on page mapping to solve this DRAM space shortage problem. Our algorithm uses a mapping information caching scheme which minimize the flash memory access frequency based on the analysis of several workloads. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can increase the performance by up to 70% comparing with the previous mapping information caching algorithm.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2023

It is impossible to overwrite on an already allocated page in SSDs, so whenever a write operation occurs a page replacement with a clean page is required. To resolve this problem, SSDs have an internal flash translation layer called FTL that maps logical pages managed by a file system of operating system to currently allocated physical pages. SSD pages discarded due to write operations must be recycled through initialization, but since the number of initialization times is limited the FTL provides a caching function to reduce the number of writes in addition to the page mapping function, which is a core function. In this study, we focus on the FTL cache methodologies reducing the number of page writes and analyze the related algorithms, and propose a write-only cache strategy. As a result of experimenting with the write-only cache using a simulator, it showed an improvement of up to 29%.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.161-171
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• 2010

As embedded systems adopt monolithic kernels, NAND flash memory is used for swap space of virtual memory systems. While flash memory has the advantages of low-power consumption, shock-resistance and non-volatility, it requires garbage collections due to its erase-before-write characteristic. The efficiency of garbage collection scheme largely affects the performance of flash memory. This paper proposes a novel garbage collection technique which exploits data redundancy between the main memory and flash memory in flash memory-based virtual memory systems. The proposed scheme takes the locality of data into consideration to minimize the garbage collection overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed garbage collection scheme improves performance by 37% on average compared to previous schemes.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.400-410
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• 2008

Flash memory has been widely used in mobile devices, such as mobile phone and digital camera. Recently flash SSD(Solid State Disk), having same interface of the disk drive, is replacing the hard disk of some laptop computers. However, flash memory still cannot be considered as the storage of database systems. The FTL(Flash Translation Layer) of commercial flash SSD, making flash memory operate exactly same as a hard disk, shows poor performance on the workload of databases with many random overwrites. Recently In-Page Logging(IPL) approach was proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, we implement IPL approach on SQLite, a popular open source embedded DBMS, and evaluate its performance. It improves the performance by up to 30 factors for update queries.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.710-716
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• 2008

This paper covers the performance evaluation of two flash memory-based file storages, NAND and NOR, which are the major flash types. To evaluate their performances, we set up separate file storages for the two types of flash memories on a PocketPC-based experimental platform. Using the platform, we measured and compared the I/O throughputs in terms of buffer size, amount of used space, and kernel-level write caching. According to the results from our experiments, the overall performance of the NAND-based storage is higher than that of NOR by up to 4.8 and 5.7 times in write and read throughputs, respectively. The experimental results show the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two schemes and provide insights which we believe assist in the design of flash memory-based file storages.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2009.04a
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• pp.699-702
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• 2009

저 전력, 내구성, 소형, 빠른 속도 등의 장점을 가지고 있는 플래시 메모리는 생산 기술 발전에 힘입어 센서 노드, 휴대폰, MP3, PMP등의 소형 전자 제품의 저장장치에서부터 SSD형태로 노트북이나 서버에 이르기 까지 그 활용범위가 더욱 확장되어 가고 있다. 다양한 시스템에서 사용될 수 있는 플래시 메모리의 특성상 이에 저장된 데이터의 호환성은 중요한 고려사항이다. 이를 위해 플래시 메모리의 고유한 특성을 숨기고 일반적인 블록장치로 에뮬레이션 해주는 소프트웨어인 FTL과 FAT 파일시스템이 플래시 메모리 관리를 위한 사실상 표준 소프트웨어로써 사용되고 있다. 그러나 범용 컴퓨터를 기반으로 개발된 FTL과 FAT 파일시스템을 열악한 하드웨어로 구성된 시스템에서 구동하는 경우 많은 제약이 발생한다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 이러한 제약사항을 극복하기 위해 최소한의 파일시스템 기능을 제공하는 FAT 표준 호환 FTL을 제안한다. 제안된 기법은 리눅스 운영체제에 동적으로 적재 가능한 모듈형태로 구현되었으며, 실험을 통해 본 논문에서 제안한 기법이 기존 기법 대비 32%의 메모리 공간을 절약할 수 있으며, 동시에 완벽한 FAT 호환성을 제공함을 확인할 수 있었다.