Page Write-Related Sector Translation for Solid State Drivers

Solid-state disks (SSD) are expected to replace magnetic disks in servers and supercomputers due to its low electronic power, nonvolatile storage, and stability. But solid-state drivers must be erased before fresh data can be written, and erase operations are too consuming, which affects the performance of solid state drivers. In order to hide the erase-before-write characteristics of NAND flash memory, an intermediate software layer called a flash translation layer (FTL) is proposed. However, most existing flash translation schemes such as BAST and FAST will increase the number of full merge operations and degrade the performance of SSD. In this paper, we propose a new solid state driver management scheme called Page Write-Related Sector Translation which is based on workload characteristic. PRST finds write-related pages from I/O request history set and writes these pages into the same block, which reduces garbage collection overhead and response time. For Postmark and IOzone workload, Experiment results indicate that PRST reduces response time by 35% over BAST and 26% over FAST. For TPC-C workload, PRST reduces response time by 12% compared to BAST and 10% compared to FAST.