An Endurance-Aware Metadata Allocation Strategy for MLC NAND Flash Memory Storage Systems
Min Huang, Zhaoqing Liu, Liyan Qiao, Yi Wang, Zili Shao · IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems · 2015
This paper presents a reliability-aware metadata allocation strategy called scatter-single-level cell (SLC) for multiple-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory storage systems. In scatter-SLC, metadata is kept in least significant bit (LSB) pages and corresponding most significant bit (MSB) pages are bypassed. Without partitioning SLC and MLC blocks, scatter-SLC can eliminate the unbalanced lifetime between SLC and MLC blocks while achieving the similar error rate as the method to store metadata in SLC blocks. We implemented scatter-SLC on a real-hardware platform. The experiment results show that scatter-SLC can reduce uncorrectable page errors by 93.54% while incurring less than 1% time overhead on average compared with the previous work.