A Garbage Collection Method for Flash Memory Based on Block-level Buffer Management Policy
Liangbo Li, Song-Sun Shin, Yan Li, Sung-Ha Baek, Hae-Young Bae · Journal of Korea Multimedia Society · 2009
Flash memory has become the most important storage media in mobile devices along with its attractive features such as low power consumption, small size, light weight, and shock resistance. However, a flash memory can not be written before erased because of its erase-before-write characteristic, which lead to some garbage collection when there is not enough space to use. In this paper, we propose a novel garbage collection scheme, called block-level buffer garbage collection. When it is need to do merge operation during garbage collection, the proposed scheme does not merge the data block and corresponding log block but also search the block-level buffer to find the corresponding block which will be written to flash memory in the next future, and then decide whether merge it in advance or not. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique improves the flash performance up to 4.6% by reducing the unnecessary block erase numbers and page copy numbers.