LAST: locality-aware sector translation for NAND flash memory-based storage systems

As flash memory technologies quickly improve, flashmemory-based storage devices are becoming a viable alternative as a secondary storage solution for general-purpose computing systems such as personal computers and enterprise server systems. Most existing flash translation layer (FTL) schemes are, however, ill-suited for such systems because they were optimized for storage write patterns of embedded systems only. In this paper, we propose a new flash management technique called LAST which is optimized for access characteristics of general-purpose computing systems. By exploiting the locality of storage access patterns, LAST reduces the garbage collection overhead significantly, thus increasing the I/O performance of flash-based storage devices. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique reduces the garbage collection overhead by 54% over the existing flash memory management techniques.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGOPS
• Authors: Sungjin Lee, Dongkun Shin, Young-Jin Kim, Jihong Kim
• Keywords: Flashmemory-based Storage Devices, General-purpose Computing Systems, SIGOPS 2008, Storage Devices