Block Aging Prevention technique (BAP) for flash based Solid State Disks

Abstract

Solid State Disks (SSDs) are becoming increasingly popular due to enhancement in speed and reduction in size, power and cost. It is an obvious choice for many applications including personal computers, embedded systems, medical and healthcare devices etc. However, the reliability of SSD has now become a critical issue and this is an area of active research. SSD uses Flash technology which is a fast, efficient nonvolatile storage chip and offers cost-effective solution for SSDs. However, with all these features, flash memory defines a limit of write-erase on its blocks. Wearleveling policies extend SSD life time by ensuring even wearleveling of the blocks in a flash memory. Several algorithms have been proposed to improve wearleveling of SSD including Hot-Cold Swapping, Dual pool Algorithm (DP), Kim and Lee algorithm (KL) and Cost Age and Times Algorithm (CAT). This paper discusses all these wearleveling policies and introduces a Block Aging Prevention (BAP) technique which has been tested on 8Gb Flash. The comparison of all these algorithms show that the proposed technique has reduced the erasure count deviation of NAND flash blocks by 6.71% and 20% compared to DP and CAT respectively. It has also reduced overhead by 4% comparatively to DP.