Flash-based solid state disks (SSDs) have been very popular in consumer and enterprise storage markets due to their high performance, low energy, shock resistance, and compact sizes. However, the increasing SSD capacity imposes great pressure on performing efficient logical to physical address translation in a page-level flash translation layer (FTL). Existing schemes usually employ a built-in RAM cache for storing mapping information, called the mapping cache, to speed up the address translation. Since only a fraction of the mapping table can be cached due to limited cache space, a large number of extra operations to flash memory are required for cache management and garbage collection, degrading the performance and lifetime of an SSD. In this paper, we first apply analytical models to investigate the key factors that incur extra operations. Then, we propose an efficient page-level FTL, named TPFTL, which employs two-level LRU lists to organize cached mapping entries to minimize the extra operations. Inspired by the models, we further design a workload-adaptive loading policy combined with an efficient replacement policy to increase the cache hit ratio and reduce the writebacks of replaced dirty entries. Finally, we evaluate TPFTL using extensive trace-driven simulations. Our evaluation results show that compared to the state-of-the-art FTLs, TPFTL reduces random writes caused by address translation by an average of 62% and improves the response time by up to 24%.

NAND flash memory is widely used in various computing systems. However, flash blocks can sustain only a limited number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, which are referred to as the endurance. On one hand, in order to ensure data integrity, flash manufacturers often define the maximum P/E cycles of the worst block as the endurance of flash blocks. On the other hand, blocks exhibit large endurance variations, which introduce two serious problems. The first problem is that the error correcting code (ECC) is often over-provisioned, as it has to be designed to tolerate the worst case to ensure data integrity, which causes longer decoding latency. The second problem is the underutilized block's lifespan due to conservatively defined block endurance. Raw bit error rate (RBER) of most blocks have not arrived the allowable RBER based on the nominal endurance point, which implies that the conventional P/E cycle-based block retirement policies may waste large flash storage space. In this paper, to exploit the storage capacity of each flash block, we propose an RBER-aware lifetime prediction scheme based on machine learning technologies. We consider the problem that the model can lose prediction effectiveness over time and use incremental learning to update the model for adapting the changes at different lifetime stages. At run time, trained data will be gradually discarded, which can reduce memory overhead. For evaluating our purpose, four wellknown machine learning techniques have been compared in terms of predictive accuracy and time overhead under our proposed lifetime prediction scheme. We also compared the predicted values with the tested values obtained in the real NAND flash-based test platform, and the experimental results show that the support vector machine (SVM) models based on our proposed lifetime prediction scheme can achieve as high as 95% accuracy for flash blocks. We also apply our proposed lifetime prediction scheme to predict the actual endurance of flash blocks at four different retention times, and the experimental results show that it can significantly improve the maximum P/E cycle of flash blocks from 37.5% to 86.3% on average. Therefore, the proposed lifetime prediction scheme can provide a guide for block endurance prediction.

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As both NAND flash memory manufacturers and users are turning their attentions from planar architecture towards three-dimensional (3D) architecture, it becomes critical and urgent to understand the characteristics of 3D NAND flash memory. These characteristics, especially those different from planar NAND flash, can significantly affect design choices of flash management techniques. In this article, we present a characterization study on the state-of-the-art 3D floating gate (FG) NAND flash memory through comprehensive experiments on an FPGA-based 3D NAND flash evaluation platform. We make distinct observations on its performance and reliability, such as operation latencies and various error patterns, followed by careful analyses from physical and circuit-level perspectives. Although 3D FG NAND flash provides much higher storage densities than planar NAND flash, it faces new performance challenges of garbage collection overhead and program performance variations and more complicated reliability issues due to, e.g., distinct location dependence and value dependence of errors. We also summarize the differences between 3D FG NAND flash and planar NAND flash and discuss implications on the designs of NAND flash management techniques brought by the architecture innovation. We believe that our work will facilitate developing novel 3D FG NAND flash-oriented designs to achieve better performance and reliability.

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