A Dead Block Approach to Minimize Erase Operation in NAND Flash Memory

Abstract

NAND flash memory is widely adopted in the various consumer electronic devices as storage media because of its characteristics like shock resistance, low cost, and energy efficiency. The main concern with the flash memory is its erase-than-write and read-write-asymmetric-speed constrain. In order to improve the performance of NAND flash memory, various techniques for management of write buffer cache (WBC) have been proposed. In this paper, we have proposed a WBC management technique which efficiently selects coldest and largest block as a victim and declares it as a dead block. Different from the existing approaches we have proposed eviction technique of selected victim block (dead block). Our proposed approach selects and evicts the dead block in such a manner that it minimizes erase operation, write operation, and increases hit ratio in WBC. The experimental results show that the dead block approach outperforms other approaches, i.e., BPLRU, cold and largest cluster policy, and Extended Unified ExLRU.