An Effective Page Padding Method for RAM Buffer Algorithms to Enhance the SSD Endurance

Abstract

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become popular for mobile devices and PCs nowadays due to their advantages compared with conventional hard disk drives. However, they suffer from endurance problems. An effective approach to increase the endurance of an SSD is to improve the management algorithm of the RAM buffer, a cache-like structure inside the SSD. There are several previous studies of RAM buffer management algorithms which improve the I/O performance and endurance of SSDs by reordering the write operations and exploiting the temporal locality of the write stream. We observe that the sequential write patterns of the write stream can be exploited to reduce the number of expensive erase operations. Using this insight, we propose a new effective method for RAM buffer management algorithms to enhance the endurance of SSDs. We evaluate our proposed method by software simulation and the result shows that the proposed method reduces the number of erasures and average response time compared to the best existing method by up to 17.3% and 16.9% respectively.