PIFCard: A High Performance Flash Card Matching the Parallelism and Latency of NAND Flash with Those of PCI-E Interface

The era of big data requires a high-bandwidth, high-concurrency architecture of storage systems. NAND flash memory acting as a replacement candidate of hard disk drives is popularly used in enterprise class storage systems due to its lower power consumption, faster random access, and higher shock resistance. To this end, we propose a high performance NAND flash-based card. The card presents three features. First, it adopts the PCI-E 2.0 x8 interface to achieve high concurrency. Second, it employs a novel Page to Block mapping Flash Translation Layer (PBFTL) to reduce response time. Third, the card leverages the out-of-order flash controller to exploit the die-level interleaving. We implement the PIFCard (PCI-E Interface Flash Card) on FPGA. Experimental results demonstrate that, the PIFCard achieves 3GB/s and 2GB/s in term of bandwidth for reading and writing, respectively.