Response time distribution of flash memory accesses

Abstract

Flash memory is becoming an increasingly important storage component among non-volatile storage devices. Its cost is decreasing dramatically, which makes it a serious competitor of disks and a candidate for being the storage device of the future. Consequently, there is an urgent need for models and tools to analyse its behaviour and evaluate its effects on a system's performance. We propose a fluid model with priority to investigate the response time characteristics of Flash memory accesses. This model can represent well the Flash access operations, respecting the erase/write/read relative priorities.