Influence of access pattern on performance of NAND-based storage

Abstract

NAND flash memory lacks an over-write operation, and NAND-based storage deploys flash translation layer (FTL), which emulates the over-write with out-of-place updates. The performance of NAND-based storage is mainly determined by the performance of the FTL, which significantly varies according to access pattern. The present work aims to identify key attributes of access pattern which favors for the FTL. If the key attributes are identified, file systems can be modified to generate NAND-friendly access pattern. The performance evaluation results through trace-driven simulations shows that the request size is the most critical factor that impacts on the performance. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.