• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.11
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• pp.1130-1137
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• 2017

The multi-leveling technique that stores multiple bits in a single memory cell has significantly improved the density of NAND flash memory along with shrinking processes. However, because of the side effects of the multi-leveling technique, the average write performance of MLC NAND flash memory is degraded more than twice that of SLC NAND flash memory. In this paper, we introduce existing cross-layer optimization techniques proposed to improve the performance of MLC NAND flash-based storages, and propose a new integration technique that overcomes the limitations of existing techniques by exploiting their complementarity. By fully exploiting the performance asymmetry in MLC NAND flash devices at the flash translation layer, the proposed technique can handle many write requests with the performance of SLC NAND flash devices, thus significantly improving the performance of NAND flash-based storages. Experimental results show that the proposed technique improves performance 39% on average over individual techniques.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.823-825
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• 2005

이동 기기의 저장장치로 널리 사용되고 있는 플래시 메모리는 하드웨어적 특성으로 인하여 쓰기 전 소거(erase before write) 기법이 사용되고 있다. 이러한 특성으로 인하여 플래시 메모리에서는 성능을 증진시키기 위한 기법이 필요하게 되었으며, 이러한 소프트웨어 모듈을 FTL이라 한다. 플래시 메모리의 용량이 크게 늘어나면서 디스크를 대체할 제품이 등장하고 있으며, 이러한 디스크가 일반 컴퓨터에서의 저장장치로 채택되는 경우가 많아지고 있다. 본 연구에서는 플래시 메모리 기반의 디스크를 이용한 윈도우 파일 시스템에서의 여러 FTL 알고리즘의 성능을 분석, 비교하고, FTL 알고리즘의 올바른 개선 방향을 제시한다.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2007.06c
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• pp.69-74
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• 2007

플래시 메모리는 하드디스크와 다른 물리적 특성을 가지고 있다. 대표적으로 덮어쓰기가 되지 않고 데이터를 읽고 쓰는 단위와 지우는 단위가 서로 다르다. 이러한 물리적 제약을 소프트웨어적으로 보완해주기 위해서 플래시 메모리를 사용하는 시스템에서는 대부분 Flash Translation Layer (FTL)을 사용한다. 지금까지 FTL 알고리즘의 대부분이 임의 쓰기 패턴보다 순차 쓰기 패턴에 훨씬 더 효율적으로 작용한다. 그러나 B-트리와 같은 자료구조에서는 일반적으로 순차 쓰기 패턴 보다는 임의 쓰기 패턴이 발생된다. 따라서 플래시 메모리상에서 B-트리를 관리할 경우 FTL에 비효율적인 쓰기 패턴을 생성하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 플래시 메모리상에서 B-트리와 같은 자료구조를 효율적으로 저장 관리하기 위한 새로운 방식을 제안한다. 새로운 방식은 B-트리에서 발생되는 임의 쓰기를 플래시 메모리상의 버퍼를 이용하여 FTL에 효율적인 순차 쓰기를 발생시킨다. 실험 결과, 본 논문에서 제안하는 방식은 기존의 방식보다 플래시 메모리에서 발생되는 쓰기 및 블록소거 연산 횟수를 60%이상 감소시킨다.

• 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:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.918-922
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• 2009

Naturally, block mapping FTL works well for sequential writes while page mapping FTL does well for random writes. To exploit their advantages, a practical FTL should be able to selectively apply a suitable scheme between page and block mappings for each write pattern. To meet that requirement, we propose a hybrid mapping FTL, which we call Janus-FTL, that distributes data to either block or page mapping areas. Also, we propose the fusion operation to relocate the data from block mapping area to page mapping area and the defusion operation to relocate the data from page mapping area to block mapping area. And experimental results of Janus-FTL show performance improvement of maximum 50% than other hybrid mapping FTLs.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.