JOM: A Joint Operation Mechanism for NAND Flash Memory

In the storage systems of NAND flash memory, an intermediate software called a Flash Translation Layer (FTL) is adopted to hide the characteristics of NAND flash memory and provide efficient management for NAND flash memory. Current flash translation layers can be classified into a page-mapping FTL, a block-mapping FTL, and a hybrid-mapping FTL. In order to utilize the advantages of the page-mapping FTL and the block-mapping FTL, the hybrid-mapping FTL is proposed to store data to the appropriate mapping mechanism by switching the mapping information between the page-mapping mechanism and the block-mapping mechanism. In the article, we propose a joint operation mechanism to rethink the advantages of the page-mapping FTL, the block-mapping FTL, and the hybrid-mapping FTL. With the joint operation mechanism, a flash translation layer can consider the main memory requirements, improve the system performance, and reduce the garbage collection overhead. The experimental results show that the proposed joint operation mechanism can achieve the goal under realistic workloads and benchmarks.