1 research outputs found
A Cache Management Strategy to Replace Wear Leveling Techniques for Embedded Flash Memory
Prices of NAND flash memories are falling drastically due to market growth
and fabrication process mastering while research efforts from a technological
point of view in terms of endurance and density are very active. NAND flash
memories are becoming the most important storage media in mobile computing and
tend to be less confined to this area. The major constraint of such a
technology is the limited number of possible erase operations per block which
tend to quickly provoke memory wear out. To cope with this issue,
state-of-the-art solutions implement wear leveling policies to level the wear
out of the memory and so increase its lifetime. These policies are integrated
into the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) and greatly contribute in decreasing the
write performance. In this paper, we propose to reduce the flash memory wear
out problem and improve its performance by absorbing the erase operations
throughout a dual cache system replacing FTL wear leveling and garbage
collection services. We justify this idea by proposing a first performance
evaluation of an exclusively cache based system for embedded flash memories.
Unlike wear leveling schemes, the proposed cache solution reduces the total
number of erase operations reported on the media by absorbing them in the cache
for workloads expressing a minimal global sequential rate.Comment: Ce papier a obtenu le "Best Paper Award" dans le "Computer System
track" nombre de page: 8; International Symposium on Performance Evaluation
of Computer & Telecommunication Systems, La Haye : Netherlands (2011