Minimizing the garbage collection time in flash memory using efficient data allocation scheme

Recently, flash memory is becoming a popular data storage device in most of the electronic consumer devices. It has lots of attractive features such as small size and light weight nature, zero noise, solid-state reliability, low power consumption, and better shock resistant. However, its two hardware characteristics, namely, i) out-place updating and ii) garbage collection process are affecting flash memory performance if these characteristics are not well-organized. To overcome these constraints, we propose an efficient page allocation scheme that based on the occurrences of page data in the data access pattern. In the scheme, we have classified the page data into hot and cold data and allocated them into different blocks. The performance of the allocation scheme is confirmed by trace-driven simulations and the merit of the proposed scheme is justified in terms of a number of active block requirements. The number of active block requirement is reduced into 16% in comparison to the existing schemes.