Extending the Lifetime of Flash-based Storage through Reducing Write Amplification from File Systems Youyou Lu Jiwu Shu∗ Weimin Zheng Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology ∗Corresponding author:
[email protected] [email protected],
[email protected] Abstract storage systems. However, the increased density of flash memory requires finer voltage steps inside each cell, Flash memory has gained in popularity as storage which is less tolerant to leakage and noise interference. devices for both enterprise and embedded systems As a result, the reliability and lifetime of flash memory because of its high performance, low energy and reduced have declined dramatically, producing the endurance cost. The endurance problem of flash memory, however, problem [18, 12, 17]. is still a challenge and is getting worse as storage Wear leveling and data reduction are two common density increases with the adoption of multi-level cells methods to extend the lifetime of the flash storage. With (MLC). Prior work has addressed wear leveling and wear leveling, program/erase (P/E) operations tend to be data reduction, but there is significantly less work on distributed across the flash blocks to make them wear out using the file system to improve flash lifetimes. Some evenly [11, 14]. Data reduction is used in both the flash common mechanisms in traditional file systems, such as translation layers (FTLs) and the file systems. The FTLs journaling, metadata synchronization, and page-aligned introduce deduplication and compression techniques to update, can induce extra write operations and aggravate avoid updates of redundant data [15, 33, 34].