An efficient and advanced space-management technique for flash memory using reallocation blocks

Flash memory offers attractive features, such as non-volatile, shock resistance, fast access, and low power consumption for data storage. However, it has one main drawback of requiring an erase before updating the contents. Furthermore, flash memory can only be erased limited number of times. To overcome limitations, flash memory needs a software layer called flash translation layer (FTL). The basic function of FTL is to translate the logical address from the file system like file allocation table (FAT) to the physical address in flash memory. In this paper, a new FTL algorithm called an efficient and advanced space-management technique (EAST) is proposed. EAST improves the performance by optimizing the number of log blocks, by applying the state transition, and by using reallocation blocks. The results of experiments show that EAST outperforms FAST, which is an enhanced log block scheme, particularly when the usage of flash memory is not full.