• 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.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.767-774
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• 2010

Due to advantages of NAND flash memory such as non-volatility, low access latency, low energy consumption, light weight, small size and shock resistance, it has become a better alternative over traditional magnetic disk drives, and has been widely used. Traditional DBMSs including mobile DBMSs may run on flash memory without any modification by using Flash Translation Layer (FTL), which emulates a random access block device to hide the characteristics of flash memory such as "erase-before-update". However, most existing FTLs are optimized for file systems, not for DBMSs, and traditional DBMSs are not aware of them. Also, traditional DBMSs do not consider the characteristics of flash memory. In this paper, we propose a flash-conscious storage system for DBMSs that utilizes flash memory as a main storage medium, and carefully put the characteristics of flash memory into considerations. The proposed flash-conscious storage system exploits log records to avoid costly update operations. It is shown that the proposed storage system outperforms the state.

• 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 KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.508-519
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• 2007

Flash memory based storage has been used in various mobile systems and now is to be used in Laptop computers in the name of Solid State Disk. The Flash memory has not only merits in terms of weight, shock resistance, and power consumption but also limitations like erase-before-write property. To overcome these limitations, Flash memory based storage requires special address mapping software called FTL(Flash-memory Translation Layer), which often performs merge operation for block recycling. In order to reduce block recycling cost in NAND Flash memory based storage, we introduce another block recycling scheme which we call migration. As a result, the FTL can select either merge or migration depending on their costs for each block recycling. Experimental results with Postmark benchmark and embedded system workload show that this cost-based selection of migration/merge operation improves the performance of Flash memory based storage. Also, we present a solution of macroscopic optimal migration/merge sequence that minimizes a block recycling cost for each migration/merge combination period. Experimental results show that the performance of Flash memory based storage can be more improved by the macroscopic optimization than the simple cost-based selection.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.535-543
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• 2015

Recently, NAND flash based storage devices are being used as a storage device in various fields through hiding the limitations of NAND flash memory and maximizing the advantages. In particular, those storage devices contain a software layer called Flash Translation Layer(FTL) to hide the "erase-before-write" characteristics of NAND flash memory. FTL includes the metadata for managing the data requested from host. That metadata is stored in internal memory because metadata is very frequently accessed data for processing the requests from host. Thus, if the power-loss occurs, all data in memory is lost. So metadata management scheme is necessary to store the metadata periodically and to load the metadata in the initialization step. Therefore we proposed the scheme which satisfies the core requirements for metadata management and efficient operation. And we verified the efficiency of proposed scheme by experiments.

• 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.13 no.1
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• pp.75-81
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• 2012

SSDs(Solid State Drives) 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 SSD 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 SSDs. However, there is no de facto standard for new garbage collection algorithms. To solve this problem, we propose trace driven offline optimal algorithms for garbage collection of FTL. The proposed algorithm always guarantees minimal number of erase operation. In addition, we verify our proposed algorithm using TPC trace.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.7B
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• pp.818-826
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• 2011

This paper proposes a novel FTL (Flash Translation Layer) algorithm employing sector-level mapping technique based on locality to reduce the number of erase operations in flash memory accesses. Sector-level mapping technique shows higher performance than other mapping techniques, even if it requires a large mapping table. The proposed algorithm reduces the size of mapping table by employing dynamic table update, processes sequential writes by exploiting sequential locality and extracts hot sector in random writes. Experimental results show that the number of erase operations has been reduced by 75.4%, 65.8%, and 10.3% respectively when compared with well-known BAST, FAST and sector mapping algorithms.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-22
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• 2010

As deployments of Flash memory are spreading out rapidly from tiny USB storages to large DB servers, interoperability become an indispensable requirement for Flash memory software architecture. For the purpose, many systems make use of the conventional FAT file system and FTL (Flash Translation Layer) software as a de facto standard. However, the tactless combination of the FAT file system and FTL does not satisfy diverse other requirements of a variety of systems. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable integrated Flash memory software architecture, named INFLAWARE (INtegrated FLAsh softWARE) that supports not only interoperability but also reconfigurability and performance enhancement. Real implementation based experimental results have shown that INFLAWARE can achieve improvements of memory footprint up to 27% with an average of 19%, compared with the conventional FAT and FTL combination. Also, by using map_destroy technique, it can reduce response times of various applications up to 21% with an average of 10%.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.19D no.2
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• pp.161-186
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• 2012

Recently, the flash memory consistently increases the storage capacity while the price of the memory is being cheap. This makes the mass storage SSD(Solid State Drive) popular. The flash memory, however, has a lot of defects. In order that these defects should be complimented, it is needed to use the FTL(Flash Translation Layer) as a special layer. To operate restrictions of the hardware efficiently, the FTL that is essential to work plays a role of transferring from the logical sector number of file systems to the physical sector number of the flash memory. Especially, the poor performance is attributed to Erase-Before-Write among the flash memory's restrictions, and even if there are lots of studies based on the log block, a few problems still exists in order for the mass storage flash memory to be operated. If the FAST based on Log Block-Based Flash often is generated in the wide locality causing the random writing, the merge operation will be occur as the sectors is not used in the data block. In other words, the block thrashing which is not effective occurs and then, the flash memory's performance get worse. If the log-block makes the overwriting caused, the log-block is executed like a cache and this technique contributes to developing the flash memory performance improvement. This study for the improvement of the random writing demonstrates that the log block is operated like not only the cache but also the entire flash memory so that the merge operation and the erase operation are diminished as there are a distinct mapping table called as the offset mapping table for the operation. The new FTL is to be defined as the XAST(extensively-Associative Sector Translation). The XAST manages the offset mapping table with efficiency based on the spatial locality and temporal locality.