• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.378-388
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• 2008

Flash memory has been attracting attention as the next mass storage media for mobile computing systems such as notebook computers and UMPC(Ultra Mobile PC)s due to its low power consumption, high shock and vibration resistance, and small size. A storage system with flash memory excels in random read, sequential read, and sequential write. However, it comes short in random write because of flash memory's physical inability to overwrite data, unless first erased. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an SSD(Solid State Disk) architecture with two novel features. First, we utilize non-volatile FRAM(Ferroelectric RAM) in conjunction with NAND flash memory, and produce a synergy of FRAM's fast access speed and ability to overwrite, and NAND flash memory's low and affordable price. Second, the architecture categorizes host write requests into small random writes and large sequential writes, and processes them with two different buffer management, optimized for each type of write request. This scheme has been implemented into an SSD prototype and evaluated with a standard PC environment benchmark. The result reveals that our architecture outperforms conventional HDD and other commercial SSDs by more than three times in the throughput for random access workloads.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.175-184
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• 2010

This paper designs a virtual USB drive for mobile devices which gives an illusion of a traditional USB flash memory drive and provides capacity-free storage space over IP network. The virtual USB drive operating with a S3C2410 hardware platform and embedded linux consists of USB device driver, an iSCSI-enabled network stack, and a seamless USB/iSCSI tunneling module. For performance enhancement, it additionally provides a kernel-level seamless USB/iSCSI tunneling module and data sharing with symbol references among kernel modules. Experiments reveal that the kernel-level implementation can improve the I/O performance up to 8 percentage, as compared with the user-level implementation.