An Efficient Management Scheme for Large-Scale Flash-Memory Storage Systems

Flash memory is among the top choices for storage media in ubiquitous computing. With a strong demand of high-capacity storage devices, the usages of flash memory quickly grow beyond their original designs. The very distinct char-acteristics of flash memory introduce serious challenges to engineers in resolving the quick degradation of system per-formance and the huge demand of main-memory space for flash-memory management when high-capacity flash mem-ory is considered. Although some brute-force solutions could be taken, such as the enlarging of management granular-ity for flash memory, we showed that little advantage is received when system performance is considered. This pa-per proposes a flexible management scheme for large-scale flash-memory storage systems. The objective is to efficiently manage high-capacity flash-memory storage systems based on the behaviors of realistic access patterns. The proposed scheme could significantly reduce the main-memory usages without noticeable performance degradation