R&D: Performance and Reliability Concern Scheme for Efficient Garbage Collection and Wear Leveling on SSD

Microsystem Technologies has published an article written by Ahmed Izzat Alsalibi, Putra Sumari, School of Computer, Science, Universiti Sains, Malaysia, Saleh A. Alomari, Faculty of Science and Information Technology, Jadara University, and Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar, Department of Information Technology, Al-Huson University College, Al-Balqa Applied University.

Abstract: “In the near future, data is expected to double in every two years, which translates to more than one terabyte of data for every person on earth. The difficulty of storing and fetching required data from data centers and servers will consequently increase. As a result, significant attention has been given to the flash memory-based solid state drive (SSD) from consumer electronics companies, which has begun to replace the existing hard disk drive and is highly likely to be used as a storage unit for most of consumer electronics to achieve low power consumption. In contrast to traditional disk, SSD uses semiconductor chips to store data. This structure enjoys original technical characteristics, including low power consumption, shock resistance, and high performance in random access. Such features can overcome the shortcomings of magnetic disks. However, flash memory, the basic unit of SSD, has many distinctive characteristics that cause various challenges. Flash memory does not support updating in the place method. A write operation can be performed only on an empty or erased unit, making the process more time-consuming. Moreover, each storage unit has a limited number of erase cycles, after which the block becomes invalid. This research proposes a new scheme called performance and reliability concern to increase the reliability and performance of SSDs. The eligibility of the proposed scheme is proven through EagleTree simulator. The scheme is also compared with other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides sufficient performance and reliability for SSD.“