• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.17-21
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• 2008

Application of flash memory in mobile and ubiquitous related devices is rapidly being increased due to its low price and high performance. In addition, some notebook computers currently come out into market with a SSD(Solid State Disk) instead of hard-drive based storage system. Regarding this trend, applications need to increase the storage capacity using multiple flash memory chips for larger capacity sooner or later. Flash memory based storage subsystem should resolve the performance bottleneck for writing in perspective of speed and lifetime according to its physical property. In order to make flash memory storage work with tangible performance, reclaiming of invalid regions needs to be controlled in a particular manner to decrease the number of erasures and to distribute the erasures uniformly over the whole memory space as much as possible. In this paper, we study the performance of flash memory recycling algorithms and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows acceptable performance for flash memory storage with multiple chips. The proposed cleaning method partitions the memory space into candidate memory regions, to be reclaimed as free, by utilizing threshold values. The proposed algorithm handles the storage system in multi-layered style. The impact of the proposed policies is evaluated through a number of experiments.

• Transactions of the Society of Information Storage Systems
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2011

The flash memory has been remarked as the next generation media of portable and desktop computers' storage devices. Their features include non-volatility, low power consumption, and fast access time for read operations, which are sufficient to present flash memories as major data storage components for desktop and servers. The purpose of our study is to upgrade a traditional mirroring scheme based on SSD storages due to the relatively slow or freezing characteristics of write operations, as compared to fast read operations. For this work, we propose a new storage management scheme called Memory Mirror-Switching based on traditional mirroring scheme. Our Mirror-Switching scheme improves flash operation performance by switching write-workloads from flash memory to RAM and delaying write operations to avoid freezing. Our test results show that our scheme significantly reduces the write operation delay and storage freezing.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.20 no.10
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• pp.525-533
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• 2014

SCST(The generic SCSI target subsystem for Linux) enables developers to make SCSI target storage and supports various SCSI network protocol such as iSCSI, FC, SRP. In this paper, we propose storage virtualization method using SCST and virtualize all flash array as high performance storage through 4Gb Fiber Channel, 10Gb Ethernet and 40Gb Infiniband and evaluate their performance, respectively. Experimental result shows that 40Gb infiniband network appliance have better performance than others. In case of sequential/random read, 40Gb infiniband network appliance shows 78% and 79% of local all flash array performance attached to SCSI target system. In case of sequential/random write, it shows 83% and 88% of local flash array performance attached to SCSI target system.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.263-272
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• 2011

The complexity of flash memory based storage systems is high due to diverse host interfaces and other design choices such as mapping granularity, flash memory controller execution models and so on. Thus, it is possible that the actual performance after implementation is not consistent with the target performance. This paper demonstrates that the performance prediction of flash memory based storage systems is possible through performance modeling that takes into account various design parameters. In the performance modeling, the FTL, which is the core element of flash memory based storage systems, is modeled as a set of (copy-on-write) logs and their interactions. Also, the flash memory controller is modeled based on the classification proposed in the design of the Ozone flash controller. In this study, the performance model has been implemented using Simulink and experimental results are presented and analyzed.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.26-34
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme that can efficiently serve I/O requests having deadlines in flash storage. The I/O requests with deadlines, namely, real-time requests, are assumed to be issued for streaming services of continuous media. Since a Web-based streaming server commonly supports downloads of HTMLs or images, we also aim to quickly process non-real-time I/O requests, together with real-time ones. For this purpose, we adopt the well-known rate-reservation EDF (RR-EDF) algorithm for determining scheduling priorities among mixed I/O requests. In fact, for the use of an EDF-style algorithm, overhead of task's switching should be low and predictable, as with its application of CPU scheduling. In other words, the EDF algorithm is inherently unsuitable for scheduling I/O requests in HDD storage because of highly varying latency times of HDD. Unlike HDD, time for reading a block in flash storage is almost uniform with respect to its physical location. This is because flash storage has no mechanical component, differently from HDD. By capitalizing on this uniform block read time, we compute bandwidth utilization rates of real-time requests from streams. Then, the RR-EDF algorithm is applied for determining how much storage bandwidth can be assigned to non-real-time requests, while meeting deadlines of real-time requests. From this, we can improve the service times of non-real-time requests, which are issued for downloads of static files. Because the proposed scheme can expand flexibly the scheduling periods of streams, it can provide a full usage of slack times, thereby improving the overall throughput of flash storage significantly.

• Transactions of the Society of Information Storage Systems
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.41-46
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• 2010

Recently, Flash Memory Drives are one of the best media to support portable and desktop computers' storage devices. Their features include non-volatility, low power consumption, and fast access time for read operations, which are sufficient to present flash memories as major database storage components for desktop and server computers. However, we need to improve traditional storage management schemes based on HDD(Hard Disk Drive) and RAID(Redundant Array of Independent Disks) due to the relatively slow or freezing characteristics of write operations of SSDs, as compared to fast read operations. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new storage management scheme called Hetero-Mirroring based on traditional HDD mirroring scheme. Hetero-Mirroring-based storage management improves RAID-1 operation performance by balancing write-workloads and delaying write operations to avoid SSD freezing.

• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.115-120
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• 2011

Recently flash memory is widely used in various mobile devices as storage medium. Nonvolatile memory can be divided into two categories: NAND- and NOR-type flash memory. NOR flash memory is mainly used to store instruction codes for operation; while NAND for data storage. However, NAND does show more economical benefits, that is, it is approximately 30~40% cheaper than NOR flash. Therefore it can be useful to improve NAND flash performance by replacing NOR flash with NAND flash combining with various buffer systems.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.157-159
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• 2007

The conventional hard disk has been the dominant database storage system for over 25 years. Recently, hybrid systems which incorporate the advantages of flash memory into the conventional hard disks are considered to be the next dominant storage systems to support databases for desktops and server computers. Their features are satisfying the requirements like enhanced data I/O, energy consumption and reduced boot time, and they are sufficient to hybrid storage systems as major database storages. However, we need to improve traditional index node management schemes based on B-Tree due to the relatively slow characteristics of hard disk operations, as compared to flash memory. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new index node management scheme called FNC-Tree. FNC-Tree-based index node management enhanced search and update performance by caching data objects in unused free area of flash leaf nodes to reduce slow hard disk I/Os in index access processes.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.767-774
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• 2010

Due to advantages of NAND flash memory such as non-volatility, low access latency, low energy consumption, light weight, small size and shock resistance, it has become a better alternative over traditional magnetic disk drives, and has been widely used. Traditional DBMSs including mobile DBMSs may run on flash memory without any modification by using Flash Translation Layer (FTL), which emulates a random access block device to hide the characteristics of flash memory such as "erase-before-update". However, most existing FTLs are optimized for file systems, not for DBMSs, and traditional DBMSs are not aware of them. Also, traditional DBMSs do not consider the characteristics of flash memory. In this paper, we propose a flash-conscious storage system for DBMSs that utilizes flash memory as a main storage medium, and carefully put the characteristics of flash memory into considerations. The proposed flash-conscious storage system exploits log records to avoid costly update operations. It is shown that the proposed storage system outperforms the state.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.181-194
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• 2009

Flash memory is increasingly being used in a wide range of storage applications because of its low power consumption, low access latency, small form factor, and high shock resistance. However, the current platforms for flash memory software development do not meet the ever-increasing requirements of flash memory applications. This paper presents three different hardware platforms for flash memory/NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) software development that overcome the limitations of the current platforms. The three platforms target different types of host system and provide various features that facilitate the development and verification of flash memory/NVRAM software. In this paper, we also demonstrate the usefulness of the three platforms by implementing three different types of storage system (one for each platform) based on them.