Endurance enhancement of flash-memory storage systems

Abstract

This work is motivated by the strong demand of reliability enhancement over flash memory. Our objective is to improve the endurance of flash memory with limited overhead and without many modifications to popular implementation designs, such as Flash Translation Layer protocol (FTL) and NAND Flash Translation Layer protocol (NFTL). A static wear leveling mechanism is proposed with limited memory-space requirements and an efficient implementation. The propreties of the mechanism are then explored with various implementation considerations. Through a series of experiments based on a realistic trace, we show that the endurance of FTL and NFTL could be significantly improved with limited system overheads.