An Empirical Study of FTL Performance in Conjunction with File System Pursuing Data Integrity

Abstract

Due to the detachability of Flash storage, which is a dominant portable storage, data integrity stored in Flash storages becomes an important issue. This study considers the performance of Flash Translation Layer (FTL) schemes embedded in Flash storages in conjunction with file system behavior that pursue high data integrity. To assure extreme data integrity, file systems synchronously write all file data to storage accompanying hot write references. In this study, we concentrate on the effect of hot write references on Flash storage, and we consider the effect of absorbing the hot write references via nonvolatile write cache on the performance of the FTL schemes in Flash storage. In so doing, we quantify the performance of typical FTL schemes for a realistic digital camera workload that contains hot write references through experiments on a real system environment. Results show that for the workload with hot write references FTL performance does not conform with previously reported studies. We also conclude that the impact of the underlying FTL schemes on the performance of Flash storage is dramatically reduced by absorbing the hot write references via nonvolatile write cache.