Sung Hoon Baek

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 35-44, Feb. 2012
10.3745/KIPSTA.2012.19.1.35,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Traditional technologies that are used to improve the performance of hard disk drives show many negative cases if they are applied to solid state drives (SSD). Access time and block sequence in hard disk drives that consist of mechanical components are very important performance factors. Meanwhile, SSD provides superior random read performance that is not affected by block address sequence due to the characteristics of flash memory. Practically, it is recommended to disable prefetching if a SSD is installed in a personal computer. However, this paper presents a combinational method of a prefetching scheme and a memory management that consider the internal structure of SSD and the characteristics of NAND flash memory. It is important that SSD must concurrently operate multiple flash memory chips. The I/O unit size of NAND flash memory tends to increase and it exceeded the block size of operating systems. Hence, the proposed prefetching scheme performs in an operating unit of SSD. To complement a weak point of the prefetching scheme, the proposed memory management scheme adaptively evicts uselessly prefetched data to maximize the sum of cache hit rate and prefetch hit rate. We implemented the proposed schemes as a Linux kernel module and evaluated them using a commercial SSD. The schemes improved the I/O performance up to 26% in a given experiment.

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