Garbage collection and wear leveling for flash memory: Past and future
Journal
2014 International Conference on Smart Computing
Pages
66-73
Date Issued
2014
Author(s)
Abstract
Recently, storage systems have observed a great leap in performance, reliability, endurance, and cost, due to the advance in non-volatile memory technologies, such as NAND flash memory. However, although delivering better performance, shock resistance, and energy efficiency than mechanical hard disks, NAND flash memory comes with unique characteristics and operational constraints, and cannot be directly used as an ideal block device. In particular, to address the notorious write-once property, garbage collection is necessary to clean the outdated data on flash memory. However, garbage collection is very time-consuming and often becomes the performance bottleneck of flash memory. Moreover, because flash memory cells endure very limited writes (as compared to mechanical hard disks) before they are worn out, the wear-leveling design is also indispensable to equalize the use of flash memory space and to prolong the flash memory lifetime. In response, this paper surveys state-of-the-art garbage collection and wear-leveling designs, so as to assist the design of flash memory management in various application scenarios. The future development trends of flash memory, such as the widespread adoption of higher-level flash memory and the emerging of three-dimensional (3D) flash memory architectures, are also discussed. © 2014 IEEE.
SDGs
Other Subjects
Data storage equipment; Design; Digital storage; Energy efficiency; Memory architecture; Monolithic microwave integrated circuits; NAND circuits; Refuse collection; Application scenario; Better performance; Development trends; Garbage collection; Non-volatile memory technology; Operational constraints; Performance bottlenecks; Threedimensional (3-d); Flash memory
Type
conference paper