• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.1204-1208
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a flash memory wear-leveling scheme that makes use of meta-data storage region as a regulation pool. By concentrating program and erase operations on the blocks with lower erase counts in the regulation pool, the proposed scheme achieve an even wear-leveling in a simple and efficient way. Experiments with an implementation of the proposed scheme in RS-FTL showed that the erase count deviation is reduced by around 40% through the erase count regulation.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.29-36
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• 2020

Wear-leveling techniques and Error Correction Codes (ECCs) are essential for the improvement of the reliability and durability of flash memories. Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes have higher error correction capabilities than conventional ECCs and have been applied to various flash memory-based storage devices. Conventional wear-leveling schemes using only the number of Program/Erase (P/E) cycles are not enough to reflect the actual aging differences of flash memory components. This paper introduces an actual aging measurement scheme for flash memory wear-leveling using LDPC decoding information. Our analysis, using error-rates obtained from an flash memory module, shows that LDPC decoding information can represent the aging degree of each block. We also show the effectiveness of the wear-leveling based on the proposed scheme through wear-leveling simulation experiments.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.126-131
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• 2015

As flash-based storage systems have been actively employed in large-scale servers and data centers, reliability has become an indispensable element. One promising technique for enhancing reliability is static wear-leveling, which distributes erase operations evenly among blocks so that the lifespan of storage systems can be prolonged. However, increasing the capacity makes the processing overhead of this technique non-trivial, mainly due to searching for blocks whose erase count would be minimum (or maximum) among all blocks. To reduce this overhead, we introduce a new randomized block selection method in static wear-leveling. Specifically, without exhaustive search, it chooses n blocks randomly and selects the maximal/minimal erased blocks among the chosen set. Our experimental results revealed that, when n is 2, the wear-leveling effects can be obtained, while for n beyond 4, the effect is close to that obtained from traditional static wear-leveling. For quantitative evaluation of the processing overhead, the scheme was actually implemented on an FPGA board, and overhead reduction of more than 3 times was observed. This implies that the proposed scheme performs as effectively as the traditional static wear-leveling while reducing overhead.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.181-185
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• 2014

The lifetime of a solid-state drive (SSD) is limited because of the number of program and erase cycles allowed on its NAND flash blocks. Data cannot be overwritten in an SSD, leading to an out-of-place update every time the data are modified. This result in two copies of the data: the original copy and a modified copy. This phenomenon is known as write amplification and adversely affects the endurance of the memory. In this study, we address the issue of reducing wear leveling through efficient handling of write requests. This results in even wearing of all the blocks, thereby increasing the endurance period. The focus of our work is to logically divert the write requests, which are concentrated to limited blocks, to the less-worn blocks and then measure the maximum number of write requests that the memory can handle. A memory without the proposed algorithm wears out prematurely as compared to that with the algorithm. The main feature of the proposed algorithm is to delay out-of-place updates till the threshold is reached, which results in a low overhead. Further, the algorithm increases endurance by a factor of the threshold level multiplied by the number of blocks in the memory.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.185-192
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• 2017

Due to the characteristics of low power, high durability and high density, NAND flash memory is being heavily used in various type of devices such as USB, SD card, smart phone and SSD. On the other hand, because of another characteristic of flash cell with the limited number of program/erase cycles, NAND flash memory has a short lifetime compared to other storage devices. To overcome the lifetime problem, many researches related to the wear leveling have been conducted. This paper presents a method called a TCB (Tracking Cold Blocks) using more reinforced constraint conditions when classifying cold blocks than previous works. TCB presented in this paper keeps a MCT (Migrated Cold block Table) to manage the enhanced classification process of cold blocks, with which unnecessary migrations of pages can be reduced much more. Through the experiments, we show that TCB reduces the overhead of wear leveling by about 30% and increases the lifetime up to about 60% compared to BET and BST.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.149-157
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose BCMR (Block Classification with Monitor and Restriction) to ensure the isolation and to reduce the interference of blocks between a garbage collection and a wear leveling. The proposed BCMR monitors an endurance variation of blocks during the garbage collection and detects hot blocks by making a restriction condition based on this information. The proposal induces a block classification by its update frequency for the garbage collection and the wear leveling, so we will get a prolonged lifetime of NAND flash memory systems. In a performance evaluation, BCMR prolonged the lifetime of NAND flash memory systems by 3.95%, on average and reduced a standard deviation per block by 7.4%, on average.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.574-577
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• 2007

While disk can be overwritten on updating data, because flash memory can not be overwritten on updating data, new data are updated in new area. If data are frequently updated, garbage collection, which is achieved by erasing blocks, should be performed to reclaim new area. Hence, because the number of erase operations is limited due to characteristics of flash memory, every block should be evenly written and erased. However, if data with access locality are processed by cost benefit algorithm with separation of hot block and cold block, though the performance of processing is high, wear-leveling is not even. In this paper, we propose CB-MB (Cost Benefit between Multi Bank) algorithm in which hot data are allocated in one bank and cold data in another bank, and in which role of hot bank and cold bank is exchanged every period. CB-MB showed that its performance was similar to that of others for uniform workload, however, the method provides much better performance than that of others for workload of access locality.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.51-57
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• 2013

Storage device based on Flash Memory 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 Storage device based on Flash Memory 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 devices. However, there is no de facto standard for new garbage collection algorithms. To solve this problem, we propose File Clustering Algorithm. File Clustering Algorithm respect to update page from same file at the same time. So, these are clustered to same block. For this mechanism, We propose Page Allocation Policy in FTL and use MIN-MAX GAP to guarantee wear leveling. To verify the algorithm in this paper, we use TPC Benchmark. So, The performance evaluation reveals that the proposed algorithm has comparable result with the existing algorithms(No wear leveling, Hot/Cold) and shows approximately 690% improvement in terms of the wear leveling.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.289-291
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• 2003

최근 들어 임베디드 시스템이 많은 발전을 하고 있고, 공간적인 장점으로 인해서 임베디드 시스템에 플래시 메모리가 많이 사용되고 있다. 그러나 플래시 메모리는 일반 자기 저장 매체와는 다른 특성을 가지고 있어서 플래시 메모리에 알맞은 효율적인 파일 관리 시스템을 필요로 한다. 현재 임베디드 리눅스에서는 JFFS2파일 시스템을 많이 사용하고 있는데, 이 논문에서는 JFFS2의 wear-leveling 알고리즘을 개선한 빈도수를 이용한 지움정책을 제안하고, 시뮬레이션을 통해서 빈도수를 이용한 지움정책의 wear-leveling이 효과적인 성능을 나타냄을 보였다.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.322-330
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• 2009

In order to utilize NAND flash memory as storage media which does not allow update-in-place and limits the number of block erase count, various garbage collection policies supporting wear-leveling have been investigated. Conventional garbage collection policies require cleaning-index calculation for the entire blocks to choose a block to be garbage-collected to support wear-leveling whenever a garbage collection is required, which results in performance degradation of system. This paper proposes a garbage collection policy which supports wear-leveling using a threshold value, which is in fact a variance of erase counts and by the maximum erase count of all blocks, without calculating the cleaning-index. During garbage collection, the erase cost is minimized by using the Greedy Policy if the variance is less than the threshold value. It achieves wear-leveling by excluding the block with the largest erase count from erase target blocks if the variance is larger than threshold value. The proposed scheme shows that a standard deviation approaches to zero as the erase count of blocks approaches to its upper limit and the measured speed of garbage collection is two times faster than the conventional schemes.