IBU: An In-Block Update Address Mapping Scheme for Solid-State Drives

Abstract

One of the most important features of solid-state drives (SSDs) is the ability to update data sectors out of place, performing garbage collection operations within its physical blocks, to mitigate limited flash memory lifespan. In SSDs, a firmware called the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is used to hide such features from the operating system. One way to extend the lifespan of flash memories is to use data compression at the FTL level. In compression-based FTLs, the address mapping type has a significant effect on the efficiency and read/write speed. The type of address mapping in previous similar schemes is based on page-level address translation and requires high memory space for the mapping table. In this paper, we propose a compression-based hybrid FTL called In Block Update Address Mapping, in which the pages of each logical block are compressed, and fewer physical pages are written in physical blocks. Therefore, a small number of free pages remain. In the proposed scheme, the required memory of the mapping table has been reduced by 78% when compared to similar schemes. Moreover, extensive simulation results reported in this paper show that the proposed FTL scheme outperforms other FTL schemes in the read and write operations under realistic benchmark workloads.

Keywords

• Flash memory
• SSD
• flash translation layer
• garbage collection
• data compression in SSD