Improving Write Performance and Extending Endurance of Object-Based NAND Flash Devices

Write amplification is a major cause of performance and endurance degradations in NAND flash-based storage systems. In an object-based NAND flash device (ONFD), two causes of write amplification are onode partial update and cascading update. Here, onode is a type of small-sized object metadata, and multiple onodes are stored in one NAND flash page. Updating one onode invokes partial page update (i.e., onode partial update), incurring unnecessary migration of the un-updated data. Cascading update denotes updating object metadata in a cascading manner due to object data update or migration. Although there are only several bytes that need to be updated in the object metadata, one or more pages have to be re-written accordingly. In this work, we propose a system design to alleviate the write amplification issue in the object-based NAND flash device. The proposed design includes (1) a multi-level garbage collection technique to minimize unnecessary data migration incurred by onode partial update and (2) a B+ table tree, Semantics-Aware Flexible (SAF) data layout, and selective cache design to reduce the write operations associated with cascading update. To guarantee system consistency, we also propose a power failure handling technique. Experiment results show that our proposed design can achieve up to 20% write reduction compared to the best states of the art.