BPLRU A Buffer Management Scheme for Improving Random Writes in Flash Storage.docx

 HYPERLINK /  BPLRU: A Buffer Management Scheme for Improving Random Writes in Flash Storage Hyojun Kim and Seongjun Ahn Software Laboratory of Samsung Electronics, Korea {zartoven, seongjun.ahn}@ Abstract Flash memory has become the most important storage media in mobile devices, and is beginning to replace hard disks in desktop systems. However, its relatively poor random write performance may cause problems in the desktop environment, which has much more complicated requirements than mobile devices. While a RAM buffer has been quite successful in hard disks to mask the low efficiency of random writes, managing such a buffer to fully exploit the characteristics of flash storage has still not been resolved. In this paper, we propose a new write buffer management scheme called Block Padding Least Recently Used, which significantly improves the random write performance of flash storage. We evaluate the scheme using trace-driven simulations and experiments with a prototype implementation. It shows about 44% enhanced performance for the workload of MS Office 2003 installation. 1 Introduction Flash memory has many attractive features such as low power consumption, small size, light weight, and shock resistance [ HYPERLINK /legacy/event/fast08/tech/full_papers/kim/kim_html/ \l douglis94storage 3]. Because of these features, flash memory is widely used in portable storage devices and handheld devices. Recently, flash memory has been adopted by personal computers and servers in the form of onboard cache and solid-state disk (SSD). Flash memory-based SSDs exhibit much better performance for random reads compared to hard disks because NAND flash memory does not have a seek delay. In a hard disk, the seek delay can be up to several milliseconds. For sequential read and write requests, an SSD has a similar or better performance than a hard disk [ HYPERLINK /legacy/event/fast08/tech/full_papers/kim/kim_html/ \l dumitru2007understanding 4]. However, SSDs exhibit worse p