Efficient Storage Management for Object-based Flash Memory

Flash memory has become increasingly popular in today's storage systems. However, replacing hard drives with flash memory in current systems often either requires major file system changes or causes performance degradation due to the limitations of block-based interface and out-of-place updates required by flash. To alleviate this problem, we propose an object-based model for flash memory that gives the hardware and firmware the ability to optimize performance for the underlying implementation. Based on this model, we propose two new data placement policies that exploit richer information from an object-based interface. Using simulation, we show that cleaning overhead can be reduced by up to 9% by separating data and metadata. Segregating the access time from metadata can further reduce the cleaning overhead by up to 23%.