Analysis, modeling and design of flash-based solid-state drives

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002825

Flash storage has rapidly grown over the last few years into a redoubtable competitor to disk drives, due to its lower power consumption, lower latencies and lower cost per IOPs. Along with its attractive characteristics, flash also presents challenges, such as limited write endurance and the inability to overwrite a block in place. To address these issues, a software called the flash translation layer (FTL) maps logical blocks to physical locations on flash. Externally, the FTL presents a normal hard disk interface; internally, it implements address translation, garbage collection and wear-leveling algorithms which spread writes uniformly across the device.