FAST: An efficient flash translation layer for flash memory

Abstract

Flash memory is used at high speed as storage of personal information utilities, ubiquitous computing environments, mobile phones, electronic goods, etc. This is because flash memory has the characteristics of low electronic power, non-volatile storage, high performance, physical stability, portability, and so on. However, differently from hard disks, it has a weak point that overwrites on already written block of flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to make it possible, an erase operation on the written block should be performed before the overwrite, which lowers the performance of flash memory highly. In order to solve this problem, the flash memory controller maintains a system software module called the flash translation layer(FTL). In this paper, we propose an enhanced log block buffer FTL scheme, FAST(Fully Associative Sector Translation), which improves the page usability of each log block by fully associating sectors to be written by overwrites to the entire log blocks. We also show that our FAST scheme outperforms the previous log block buffer scheme.