• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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: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 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: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.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.639-644
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• 2015

The capacity of flash-based storage such as Solid State Drive(SSD) and embedded Multi Media Card(eMMC) is ever-increasing because of the needs from the end-users. However, if a flash-based storage crashes, such as during power failure, the flash translation layer(FTL) is responsible for the crash recovery based on the entire flash memory. The recovery time increases as the capacity of the flash-based storages increases. We propose O1FTL with O(1) crash recovery time that is independent of the flash capacity. O1FTL adopts the working area technique suggested for the flash file system and evaluates the design on a real hardware platform. The results show that O1FTL achieves a crash recovery time that is independent of the capacity and the overhead, in terms of I/O performance, and achieves a low P/E cycle.