Detecting Solid-State Disk Geometry for Write Pattern Optimization

Abstract

Solid-state disks use flash memory as their storage medium, and adopt a firmware layer that makes data mapping and wear leveling transparent to the hosts. Even though solid-state disks emulate a collection of logical sectors, the I/O delays of accessing all these logical sectors are not uniform because the management of flash memory is subject to many physical constraints of flash memory. This work proposes a collection of black-box tests can detect the geometry inside of a solid-state disk. The host system software can arrange data in the logical disk space according to the detected geometry information to match the host write pattern with the device characteristic for reducing the flash management overhead in solid-state disks.