FlashLite: A User-Level Library to Enhance Durability of SSD for P2P File Sharing

Peer-to-peer file sharing is popular, but it generates random write traffic to storage due to the nature of swarming. NAND flash memory based solid-state drive (SSD) technology is available as an alternative to hard drives for notebook and tablet PCs. As it turns out, random write is extremely detrimental to the lifetime of SSD drives. This paper focuses on the following problem, namely, P2P file downloading when the target of the download is an SSD drive. We make three contributions: first, analysis of write patterns of downloading program to establish the premise of the problem; second, development of a simple yet powerful technique called FlashLite to combat this problem, by automatically converting the random writes to sequential writes; third, showing through performance evaluation using modified eMule file downloading program that FlashLite does change random writes to sequential, and most importantly eliminates about 94% of erase operations of the original eMule program.