Garbage Collection Technique for Balanced Wear-out and Durability Enhancement with Solid State Drive on Storage Systems

Recently, the use of NAND flash memory is being increased as a secondary device to displace conventional magnetic disk. NAND flash memory, as one among non-volatile memories, has many advantages such as low power, high reliability, low access latency, and so on. However, NAND flash memory has disadvantages such as erase-before-write, unbalanced operation speed, and limited P/E cycles, unlike conventional magnetic disk. To solve these problems, NAND flash memory mainly adopted FTL (Flash Translation Layer). In particular, garbage collection technique in FTL tried to improve the system lifetime. However, previous garbage collection techniques have a sensitive property of the system lifetime according to write pattern. To solve this problem, we propose BSGC (Balanced Selection-based Garbage Collection) technique. BSGC efficiently selects a victim block using all intervals from the past information to the current information. In this work, SFL (Search First linked List), as the proposed block allocation policy, prolongs the system lifetime additionally. In our experiments, SFL and BSGC prolonged the system lifetime about 12.85% on average and reduced page migrations about 22.12% on average. Moreover, SFL and BSGC reduced the average response time of 16.88% on average.